On: Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to...

[emodendroket]

In that case it seems simpler to introduce an IsDeleted flag than to have a convention that 1000 goes on the end of the name.

[Bjartr → emodendroket]

Someone wanted to get this done without waiting on the DBA team so they rolled some implicit schema instead.

[neovive → emodendroket]

This reminds me of a good use case for the Laravel Soft Deletes: https://laravel.com/docs/7.x/eloquent#soft-deleting.

[marcofatica → neovive]

love this feature so much

[nunez → emodendroket]

I'm learning about database design, and I'm learning that this might not be that easy if the relationships between users and other data on the site are ill-defined. There may be multiple tables in their design that will require knowledge of that flag, and it might legitimately be way easier to just add junk to the end of the user account than it is to introduce a new flag.

[0xCMP → emodendroket]

Sure, but that just covers up the lie better. Maybe a flag "ToBeDeleted" and any stilled logged in sessions see account is scheduled for deletion.