Question RESOLVED: Assign forum posts from deleted account to new account?

Recently I made the mistake of deleting a user account and am now trying to sync their old forum posts to a new account I created for them. Has anyone ever achieved this? I have tried a few database changes and can't seem to figure it out.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your very good question. Sometimes people have to learn the hard way that, as we have consistently written on this forum, you should never delete a user's account. This is because, if that user has posted anything on the forum, their messages will be orphaned. It's not too difficult, with a reasonable knowledge of SQL and a tool like phpMyAdmin, to reassign the messages from the old user-id to the new user-id. As far as I know, this is the only way of reassigning ownership of forum messages.

As it is the more-or-less the policy of this website to not provide specific instructions about what changes to make in SQL - because, in the hands of inexperienced users, there's a very real danger of totally messing up your website - I don't propose to go any further at this time than to give you general advice. I hope that helps.

Thanks for the reply. You can be assured I learned the hard way not to make the mistake of deleting accounts, but it was accidental. Also I understand this sites policy about not getting too specific about working within the MySQL database but, I've been creating websites since 1995 and working with Joomla since 2003. Any chance you might send me a PM?

I resolved this issue.

If you delete a user account and then want to assign user posts to a different account, do this:

BACKUP YOUR DATABASE!

1. Open your forum (front end)
2. Locate the orphaned post and note the ID number
3. Locate the user account ID you want to assign the orphaned posts to
3. Log into phpmyadmin
4. Click on jos_kunena_messages
5. Sort this table by "id"
6. Locate the orphaned post ID number and click "Edit"
7. Look for "userid" and change this to the user account ID you want to associate it with
8. Save

Done.

And be very, very careful. Yes, backup your database and be sure that you know how to restore it!