[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #36196: Users without a role are not being displayed

[WordPress Trac]

#36196: Users without a role are not being displayed
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 Reporter:  tobi823                     |       Owner:
     Type:  defect (bug)                |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal                      |   Milestone:  Future Release
Component:  Users                       |     Version:  4.4
 Severity:  normal                      |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  has-patch needs-unit-tests  |     Focuses:  multisite
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Comment (by brocheafoin):

 Replying to [comment:5 flixos90]:
 > I think there is a difference between a user not being active for a site
 at all vs. a user not having any capabilities for a site.

 The most obvious use case for a user without any capabilities is a former
 author. You would want to leave them as author of their content but
 prevent them from doing anything. When you remove a user completely, you
 have to reassign their content to another user, which would not be
 appropriate.

 In that case,
 > this user is in a broken state
 would not be completely true.

 Furthermore...
 > users without roles (on any sites) are a special case. In multisite,
 they have the "User Dashboard" as a fallback, and they are always visible
 via the "Network Dashboard" users.php page.
 This is all true, but as long as users without a roles aren't displayed in
 the users table, there is no UI to actually _give_ them a role.

 Additional consideration:
 * The documentation for `WP_User->set_role()` says that "You can set the
 role to an empty string and it will remove all of the roles from the
 user." which is exactly how we end up with users without roles.
 * `is_user_member_of_blog()` only verifies the
 "$prefix_$blogid_capabilities" meta's existence to determine membership.
 As far as it's concerned, users without a role are considered as members
 of the site. Logically, they should be visible on the site's users table.

 TL;DR: I'm @flixos90. Let's make users without roles first-class citizens.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/36196#comment:13>
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