Tidying up membership for GDPR by deleting subscribers and subscriptions

I want to delete old subscribers/subscriptions to tidy up the membership list and for GDPR purposes.

I have 'Subscription Renewal Behavior' set to 'Create New Subscription' (but I'm not sure whether I really need this or what the pros and cons are).

So, I have:

a) subscribers who no longer have an active subscription (ie Expired)
b) subscribers who have a current Active subscription but also may have previous Expired Subscriptions.

1. What's the best or right way to go about deleting the old members without deleting any Active subscribers and their subscriptions?

If I go to the Subscriptions tab, filter for Expired subscriptions and delete all of these (or at least those with an End Date of, say, more than six months old), will that leave all the current Active Subscriptions and will that completely delete the Subscribers if all their subscriptions have Expired?

2. Will that also delete the joomla User account for that subscriber? If that doesn't delete the joomla User, is there a way to delete them automatically?

3. I also use acymailing: will deleting the subscriptions/subscribers also delete them from the acymailing user list?

4. Also, I would certainly back up before doing this just in case, but backing up the complete joomla install seems overkill (and backing up just the #__osmembership_subscribers table  is something I'd prefer not to have to deal with). Have you thought about adding a way from inside Membership Pro to backup and restore the complete list of subscriptions and configuration so that this could be done before major changes are made just in case something goes wrong? That would be a very useful feature!

Anyone able to help me with this? What's the best or right way to remove expired subscribers and subscriptions?

I've been experimenting with a test subscription. Deleting the subscription (and these could be selected to be say, subscriptions that had an end date six months prior), also deletes the subscriber record, which is good, but it doesn't delete the joomla user and it doesn't delete the acymailing user, so these would need to be deleted manually.

For a large number of expired subscriptions, this will be a pain to do.

Is there a way to automatically delete the joomla user and the acymailing user when a Membership Pro subscription is deleted?

Hello Alan

Currently, we do not support that option. Deleting user account when subscription deleted could cause data lost, so we will have to think about it carefully.

Maybe we can try to fix it in next release. But it will have to be an optional option only

For the time being, better go to Users -> Manage, delete these user accounts manually from there

Regards,

Tuan

Thanks, Tuan.

I think it would be useful to have the option to also delete the joomla user.

I'm not sure about acymailing - it looks like users are not being removed from the mailing list when their subscription expires but I need to do some testing to check this properly.

I have it set up so a user whose membership expires is removed from the acymailing list: does deleting a user also remove them from the acymailing list, or does that have to be done manually?

Delete subscription records should also remove users from mailing lists. But it won't delete user from ACYMailing

Regards

Tuan

Sorry, Tuan, I don't understand. Which mailing lists will they be deleted from?

Hi Alan

It's the mailing list which subscriber is subscribed to when they subscribe for the plan. Delete is not the right word, it should be unsubscribed from the mailing lists

Tuan

Ah, of course.

I also asked about backing up subscribers, configuration, etc so that everything could all be restored if I messed things up. I said:

4. Also, I would certainly back up before doing this just in case, but backing up the complete joomla install seems overkill (and backing up just the #__osmembership_subscribers table is something I'd prefer not to have to deal with). Have you thought about adding a way from inside Membership Pro to backup and restore the complete list of subscriptions and configuration so that this could be done before major changes are made just in case something goes wrong? That would be a very useful feature!

Is this something you can consider for the future?

Hi Alan

Honestly, I don't have plan for that feature at the moment. I think backup tool like Akeeba Backup allows you to choose to backup selected database tables only? And that could be used to handle this case ?

Introduce this feature in Membership Pro is not something quick and easy. We will have to think about the case there are 50K subscription records or so and if we do not handle it properly, the process could be timed out and could cause broken database

Regards,

Tuan