Question

I allow anonyous users to post a comment. I generate a GUID and insert them into a userTable and assign an anonymous role.

I dont save much other than the post itself tso the user table fields are pretty much empty.

My concern is that I will have unnecessary rows in the user table which I then have to go in at some point and erase and risk messing things up. And aslo that generating a GUID and doing the extra insertion is expensive?

What is the point to do what im doing vs simply storing the post with a GUID shared by all anonymous posts?

can someone assess efficacy here?

Answer 1

I would store these unauthenticated users in a separate table, migrating them to your main user table when they authenticate or signup. This will allow you to easily purge them when they haven’t visited in a couple of months.

I assume, to some extent, that you set a cookie or something that allows you to do some tracking, otherwise I don’t see much point in creating a guid and going to all the work of creating a user at all.