Delete and SharePoint Forums

So I'm sitting with a quandry and figured I would solicit feedback.

A long time ago, in an IDE far, far, away I added a ranking system to the SharePoint Forums Web Part. This is the typical ranking system you see on forums. New user joins forum, gets rank of "Newbie" and after some # of posts, becomes a "Member" (or "Journeyman" or "Apprentice" or [insert witty title here]). All is good in the world.

Currently the Web Part tracks all the posts a user makes. It doesn't track where they make that post, just that they did. Hence if the ranking system was in place, after # number of posts you graduate from one title to the next. Titles are all configurable by the admin. Okay, so the ranking system isn't in the current version (it was pulled late in the game to simplify hunting down any problems the first release would have) but deleting posts affects it and that's where you come in.

When you delete say a forum from the system (and all topics and a posts in each topic) you skew the numbers. Now the counts are thrown off. Say a user posts 100 messages in a single forum and the admin decides to blow that forum away. Now the user has 100 posts in his profile, but there are only 50 messages in the entire system (and nothing from that user because all his posts were in one forum which is now gone).

So, is it worth the time/effort/bother to go through and update each users post count as each post is deleted (which can be time consuming) or does it matter that Jimmy has a post count that isn't indicitive of how many posts are in the system (i.e. some users might have higher post counts than the number of messages in the system).

Like I said, looking for some feedback to determine how important delete is in the system. Feel free to leave comments here, post a message on the forums (I've started a thread here), or email me.

Thanks!

1 Comment

  • I suppose you could either do it the way you've just mentioned, maintaining the post counts when events such as adding or deleting posts occurs, but as you've highlighted, this can be unreliable.

    Or, calculating a users posts count when your loading their profile or details. I'm not sure how much of an overhead this would pose.

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