Issue noted with "Automatically Delete Inactive Clients"

[penguin]

We've been testing the new "Automatically Delete Inactive Clients" function that was implemented as part of the GDPR enhancements to automatically remove clients who did not have an invoice within a defined number of months. An issue has been noted however in that if a ne customer registers an account yet does not order immediately, when the cron runs their account is deleted as they have no invoice generated within the number of months specified. I've opened a ticket with WHMCS asking for clarification on the logic surrounding the deletion process to better understand this.

Quote

An inactive client is defined as a client with no active products, services, addons or domains

If you are using this function and have any customers that have either not placed an order, or maybe use an account for support tickets only then there is a good chance they are going to be deleted so please be aware until further clarification has been given by WHMCS.

If this is the case, I'd be interested to see what others think should be used to enhance this - should it look at tickets or logins within the same timeframe or have a separate timeframe for these? It certainly doesn't look good if a new customer opens an account and then hours later they are deleted because they haven't ordered.

Edited June 6, 2018 by penguin

[penguin]

WHMCS have come back to me regarding this and there is now  a case CORE-12285 regarding this issue. They have suggested in the meantime creating a dummy £0.00 invoice to prevent clients from being deleted, however this isn't practical for general use as it would be confusing for customers having a zero priced invoice created and also it would mean tracking these as and when they sign up.

[MarceloPe]

Hello penguin, I've noticed this issue too. We set the new feature to delete users with more than 12 months, and it deleted newly created users on the last week 😞

The workaround I found is to enable the option "Disable Automatic Status Update" in the user profiles you don't want to be purged. That worked here.

Hope to see a fix to this issue soon, as this is becoming a PITA cause if you forget to "protect" the status update of new users, you just lose them, and it's embarassing to ask them to re-register again whenever they claim they wanted to purchase something and could not find their account.