Deleted users may be better renamed to something other than 'Ghost'

[sogono]

Feature Description

A frequent contributor to one of our repositories unfortunately passed away and their user was eventually removed from the repository for the sake of organization, resulting in all of their issues and contributions now being attributed to Ghost. While rare, some users in this situation may find it uncomfortable. Clicking on links to the user 'Ghost' also leads to a 404. (v1.16.9)

Screenshots

No response

[KN4CK3R]

You have deleted or deactivated that account?

[delvh]

Clicking on links to the user 'Ghost' also leads to a 404.

This sounds like a bug of its own. Normally, ghost users should not have any links. Where exactly do you see these links?

While rare, some users in this situation may find it uncomfortable

Well, an alternative would be to rename it to i.e. Unknown.
But I don't know if that can be easily done without breaking existing things...

[wxiaoguang]

FYI: https://github.com/ghost

(and more https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-and-managing-your-personal-account-on-github/managing-personal-account-settings/deleting-your-personal-account )

[sogono]

Clicking on links to the user 'Ghost' also leads to a 404.

This sounds like a bug of its own. Normally, ghost users should not have any links. Where exactly do you see these links?

In the timeline of an issue where the user had added or removed Labels, there are items such as "Ghost added the label 'in-progress'" where clicking Ghost navigates to [repohost].com/Ghost which 404s

[delvh]

I've just created another issue so that the ghost-link issue won't be lost if this issue gets resolved.

[sogono]

You have deleted or deactivated that account?

I'm not sure what status the account is in since none of us have access to it. I believe the account was unassociated with our repo by the administrator.

[thekk1]

There is an inconsistent handling for deleted users in different views.

While the name column at the commits view have the correct full name without a link from a deleted user, which is correct and wanted, the activity notifications inside of an issue have a now a ghost tag with a link to nowhere.

[KN4CK3R]

The name of the committer is stored inside Git. That's the reason why there is still a name displayed. But that name must not be the name used by the user in Gitea.

[thekk1]

The name of the committer is stored inside Git. That's the reason why there is still a name displayed. But that name must not be the name used by the user in Gitea.

This makes sense i.e. for setting a tag or writing a comment but not for messages like "Ghost referenced this Issue 2025-02-07 +01: 00 from a commit" because this notification comes directly from and refers directly to the commit where the user name is still known.
Again, this could and should be fixed.