nopCommerce doesn't delete customers from database

Hi!

I have a situation where, when i delete a customer from Administration>Customers, the customer is deleted from admin panel, but a record representing that customer in database table Customers is not removed! The customer still exists in the database.

Why is this happening? What is the solution?

Thanks in advance!

It's to preserve data integrity.  If you actually deleted them, you would lose all of that info on any orders they placed.  It's called a "soft delete".  The record remains but the Deleted field is changed to 1.

kiriz wrote:

Basically nopCommerce doesn't delete important data, but mark them as deleted. :)

kiriz wrote:

Hello Kiriz,

Here you can check the advantages of soft delete (setting a flag against the record instead of deleting it permanently from the database): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/378331/physical-vs-logical-soft-delete-of-database-record

Hope it helps...

Soft deletes are fine, but then you need to have a way for admins to see deleted customers and uncheck the deleted ones that we want to re-instate.  This would be better than me having to go into the DB backend and find them and change the Deleted column value for that customer.

So i have read through the comments about the deletion of customers and quite frankly this makes no sense to me and here is why i say so.
Scenario :- A client of mine Registers on my site but never buys any product, the customer account then gets deleted during routine maintenance, now the customer record is missing from the Admin Panel. A couple of months later the client wants to re-register and now gets the error "Email address already exists" so the customer can then never register again because the same error keeps presenting itself. No important data is attached to this client ie, no orders where ever placed and paid for but i now stand to loose a potential client because of a "Soft Delete"???

Now further to this i have "spam" Guest accounts getting created daily even though i have CAPTCHA and Email Verification activated on my site, i daily delete these spam guest accounts and yet they stay on the database. My current extract of my customers shows 13500 records and i only have 50 odd "Actual" Registered clients. This seems a bit ineffective as i have a database growing with garbage entries that i cannot get rid of. The Admin function has 3 "House keeping" functions ie
1. Deleted Guest Accounts with shopping cart
2. Delete Accounts without shopping carts
3. Delete abandoned shopping cart

I as i assume everybody else is only interested in the clients who "Register" and actually order a product and pay for it, for a Guest i could really care less.

How can this be resolved? I am no DB Admin who has the time to go into the backend of a database to remove dude client records. I have seen the comment of important data, what is important about Guest accounts? The do not enter any real data anyway

Yes, I want to know this also. How can this be solved? I don't care about guest accounts. If there was a way to turn this off, I would. If the site admin chooses to not allow guest checkout, then guest accounts are not necessary right?

Regards