[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #14179: Theme asking to update (theme with same name on WordPress.org)

[WordPress Trac]

#14179: Theme asking to update (theme with same name on WordPress.org)
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 Reporter:  design_dolphin  |       Owner:
     Type:  defect (bug)    |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal          |   Milestone:  WordPress.org
Component:  Themes          |     Version:
 Severity:  normal          |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                  |     Focuses:
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Comment (by williampatton):

 I hate to play devil's advocate against something which sounds like a
 thoroughly thought out potential solution.

 I can see an issue in the case of author and author URI changes. If either
 of those are changed then existing users from before the switch would lose
 benefits of update notifications (and lose the future updates too!).

 Also sometimes themes are willingly traded to other users - I see it
 mostly with themes that authors do not have time to maintain, they pass to
 someone who wants to maintain it. Currently the new theme owner will
 inherit active installs with the theme. If the UID changed with author
 switch then the new author will not inherit the userbase along with the
 theme and the pre-existing users will no longer get updates. It is
 expected that if a theme willingly changes hands then the existing users
 will come along with the theme.

 Newly added UIDs would also need to be relational with any previously
 generated UIDs of the same theme so that pre-existing users are not lost
 (and they don't miss out on possible updates) when UID changes.

 Linking of UIDs in this way should not negate any of the fixes for of
 popular/actives abuse nor the issue of non-org themes being updated from
 .org source of matching slug/name with the above proposal.

 P.S. If we're thinking about CPU load then making the UIDs relational like
 this will almost certainly result in many more lookups and additional
 processing to combine stats across different UIDs. I haven't tested total
 load if such changes were made but I would imagine it's not a negligible
 amount.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/14179#comment:37>
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