In the last four months there was a lot of discussion about some decisions made by the developers of the famous shopping cart plugin WP e-Commerce. I think that discussion would not have exist if there were no users affected by the decisions that originated it. It is to be noted that version 3.8.14, the most recent release of WP e-Commerce, is supposed to definitely fix the issue, but I’m sure there will be a lot of people not putting the plugins on their sites up to date, and there can appear some possible issues with backward compatibility that need to be solved. That’s what this article is meant to.
You can read the first page of the thread if your interested in the technical implications, but basically, since version 3.8.13, WP e-Commerce saves the session data of anonymous customers into the wp_users and wp_usermeta tables, instead of doing it into transients, as was formerly done and other shopping cart solutions, such as WooCommerce, still do. This means that every time a non-registered visitor enters your site a new user will be created and some meta data for that user will be stored. So, if your site gets a lot of visitors, your database will be populated with lots of dummy users in a considerably short time. There is a scheduled task meant to remove this users hourly, but it doesn’t work quite well in some server configurations, so there will be sites where the tables won’t ever be automatically cleaned, with databases growing uncontrollably larger and larger in just a matter of days. That’s not something that any capable developer or site owner wants for his website.
So let me stop here for a minute. I’m not in the train of detractors of this practice. I don’t think it is ideal, but I do think there is a really good reason to do things this way and not another. I’m not that into discussing things that were already done as I am for trying to fix what’s wrong with them. There has been a lot of hate comments, ranting and whining in the thread I linked at the beginning, and I’m pretty sure that’s not the way to solve things, and don’t have me start on the kind of motivation that a programmer finds to get something fixed when he or his product is being attacked. So please, if you need some software to be fixed, be nice and friendly to your programmer. Otherwise, either he won’t do it well or will just walk away from you.
Now let’s get into the problem. This is not exactly a tutorial, so if you’re looking for a copy & paste kind of solution, you’re not gonna find it here. If you have this problem, the solution will depend on your specific server configuration, so you may need to do some modifications to the examples of code I’m gonna provide here.
