User Management

[awead]

Currently there are over 247 million user records in the database, all of them "guest user" accounts created by the devise-guests gem. This is because user records are created for every new session. We need to curtail these.

Proposal

1. Create a single "public user" record that serves as the current_user for everybody (this is what we do in Scholarsphere)
2. Create a second "admin user" record that serves as the current_user for admin users or other users with elevated privileges
3. Drop database Bookmarks in the catalg
4. Remove the devise-guests gem

Related Issues

#836
#331

[awead]

TL;DR we still have a users table, but there's only 2 rows in it: 1 for the public user, the other for admin user.

[banukutlu]

thanks for adding this issue @awead, I like the public and admin user idea!

[whereismyjetpack]

now that bookmarks are factored out, i don't see a problem with the proposal. Is the reason we need a user in the first place a blacklight-ism?

[awead]

@whereismyjetpack I was just thinking that as well. Do we even need the concept of a database-backed user object? If the answer is no, then we probably don't even need Devise either.

[whereismyjetpack]

Interesting. If we could have anonymous sessions and rid devise, we could remove some deps and MySQL!