Canceling a user account, assigning content to Anonymous, should clear the comment name

if it affects drupal.org then it will be back ported.

@drumm I can confirm that the patch fullfils its objective. But this needs a test.

@drumm Funny I was going to ask you the same question :)

@drumm: I'm creating a new test class called CommentUserChangesTest

I ended up adapting the existing UserCancelTest test

Here's the patch with tests.

I keep forgetting the status..

And the funny thing is that in the tests $test_node->getRevisionAuthor()->getUsername() is 'admin' after the anonymization takes place, but that seems to be a side effect of the fact that the author is uid 0.

Awesome this looks good let's wait for bot.

let's fix d.o

This issue addresses a major bug and is allowed per https://www.drupal.org/core/beta-changes. Committed and pushed to 8.0.x. Moving to 7.x for backport.

And a fixed D7 patch with tests...

I tested it too. RTBC+1 from me. Resetting the status.

Hm, are we sure the current behavior isn't intentional? Consider two identical sites (and assume anonymous users are allowed to leave comments):

1. Site A:
   • President Obama is a registered user.
   • President Obama logs in and leave some comments. The comments have the name "President Obama" attached to them.
   • President Obama deletes his account and chooses the option to assign to anonymous.
   • When other users view the site, the above comments now have the name "President Obama (not verified)" attached to them.
2. Site B:
   • President Obama never joined this site.
   • An anonymous user comes along and leaves some comments, typing in "President Obama" for the name field.
   • When other users view the site, the above comments have the name "President Obama (not verified)" attached to them.

So comparing the two sites you can't actually tell that the real President Obama was ever a member of the first one anyway. (The appearance of the "not verified" is supposed to indicate that this the comment wasn't left by a registered user, so it doesn't actually provide any identifying info - anyone could have typed that name in.)

To be more specific, the reason you might want to leave the names behind when deleting the account is to distinguish the comments on a long thread, e.g. if multiple users who commented on that thread had their accounts deleted, for sanity's sake you still want to see that the comments were left by different people.

I can see why drupal.org (which doesn't allow anonymous commenting in the first place) might rather delete these but I'm not sure it's the right solution in general. This could use some more discussion.

I agree with @drumm. It is confusing to the extreme that "make its content belong to the Anonymous user", doesn't apply to all content. This should be consistent across the board.

"Content" is an ambiguous word - I think both interpretations are valid here, and certainly both use cases are valid.

We are talking about deleting data from the database, so I really don't think this behavior is something we can just change out from under people in the middle of a stable release. I hate to suggest adding more options to the admin UI, but since both scenarios are valid, that could be an option here - the Comment module could add a checkbox that allows the administrator to choose between the two behaviors.

Agree this is not a D7 bug, but rather something slightly different from current D7 functionality.

But don't put this option in the comment module settings. This should be a form:_alter, adding that option to the user delete UI.