how to purge anonymous guest users from DB

rubyonrails-talk
1

I am creating anonymous guest users which are persistent during the time they are connected to the site or until they sign up and become a member user ...

this add a lot of anonymous user records in the DB and I wonder how to purge them ? should I run a cron script regularly or is there another way to do it ?

thanks for feedback

I have in my application_controller :

  # if user is logged in, return current_user, else return guest_user   def current_or_guest_user     if current_user       if session[:guest_user_id]         logging_in         guest_user.destroy         session[:guest_user_id] = nil       end       current_user     else       guest_user     end   end

  # find guest_user object associated with the current_session, creating one if needed   def guest_user     User.find( session[:guest_user_id].nil? ? session[:guest_user_id] = create_guest_user.id : session[:guest_user_id] )   end

  def create_guest_user     u = User.new(email: "guest_#{Time.now.to_i}#{rand(99)} @example.com")     u.confirmed_at = Time.now     u.save(:validate => false, :confirm => false)     u   end

2

I am creating anonymous guest users which are persistent during the

time they are connected to the site or until they sign up and become a

member user …

this add a lot of anonymous user records in the DB and I wonder how to

purge them ? should I run a cron script regularly or is there another

way to do it ?

A nightly cronjob would be one way to do it. But do you really want to delete them? It might be useful to keep these users, while they haven’t signed up, their data may still be of value (eg for identifying why they didn’t sign up)

Fred