Chris, DNN is literally crippled, out of the box, with this "feature" implemented.

Today, I am attempting to deal with a situation where someone who is a subscriber to Softletter had their basic business information improperly entered. In an attempt to "clear the board," they deleted the record and attempted to reenter the record with the correct information.

THEY CAN'T! They can NEVER, using this unbelievable design, ever enter that record with that E-mail address again!  From the standpoint of DNN, the E-mail address is now in the Phantom Zone.

This is database design at its very worst (and I speak as someone who started off coding in Vulcan).

+++ Rick, while I understand where you are coming from, just because a username can't be reused without clearing out the rest of the user info, think about the fact that DNN is a multi-portal solution. It's possible that a user can exist in multiple portals. If you deleted the user in one portal, should they be deleted in all portals? A hard delete would cause enormous issues with this.+++

Chris, this is a question of intelligent database design. I don't know how you've assembled this DBMS and I don't want to know. But I'll assume from what you've said that DNN uses a common database framework for all the websites ("portals") that can be built from the basic installation.

And, of course, the answer to that is a table that points to all the portals and a record with the user Id with a field that points to the portals the user is in and of course a flag that indicates if they're in or not in that particular portal, etc, etc.  It's been years since I have had to figure out a relational schema but this isn't THAT hard.

+++ If you've turned on the email address restrictions that an email can't be reused with another account,+++

If you're running John n' Jane's kiddie website, I'm sure allowing multiple records to use the same E-mail account is no problem.

No serious commercial website would allow it; that's a security and liability nightmare.

+++ DNN is not crippled, you just ran into a custom issue +++

This is NOT a custom issue.  This is how this thing is built out of the box. The implementation is poorly thought through and ridiculous on the face of it. A CMS that if you decide not to allow duplicate E-mail records in the DBMS can NEVER purge that record till the end of time! It's sort of funny! If someone unsubscribes from your site, and resubscribes, they'll never be able to! You'll need to have the "Tell the user to change his E-mail moniker; I don't care if he wants to come back, he ain't getting in again with THAT stinking address" DNN module"

I don't really want to argue with you over the point; I don't think there's much to debate here.  I've talked to some very experienced programmers about the design and am having one overcome this horrible implementation. If you have knowledge of some util or plugin that can make this thing work properly, please let me know. Otherwise, I'll just have my guy do what needs to be done.

But I'm sorry; this is an indefensible design.

rick chapman
www.softletter.com
www.saasuniversity.com