Allow themes to re-use a rejected slug

[dd32]

Currently when a theme is rejected/not-approved the rejected theme blocks the usage of that slug going forward.

For example, in 2010 a theme called 'Green' was uploaded: ​https://themes.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2 and added to SVN: ​https://themes.trac.wordpress.org/browser/green/
That theme was rejected, but 11 years later no other theme can re-use that slug without someone from meta stepping in to make it happen.

That's a "bad" example, as uploading a theme called Green would actually be blocked by the active installs check, but it's an example of a theme that we've still got hosted even though it's not of benefit to anyone.

I think we should remove these old uploads which haven't been accepted/etc and allow the name to be re-used by something else - assuming it can meet the other upload requirements.

Perhaps it should stay blocked for the author of the uploaded theme for a given amount of time, 12 months seems plenty of time to me, after that any rejected themes (that were never published) should release their slugs and remove their SVN directories.

Having the post objects shift from being in a 'draft' state to 'rejected' would also help cleanup the wp-admin listing.

Proposal:
For any submitted theme that is marked as rejected, and has never been published on WordPress.org:

• After 12 months, rename the post slug to rejected-$slug to free the slug
• After 12 months, svn rm https://themes.svn.wordpress.org/$slug to free the SVN location

[joyously]

I'm in favor of this, but does this affect Trac at all? Would there be old tickets pointing to nowhere?

[Ipstenu]

We use rejected-PLUGIN-rejected to ensure no possible bad-hits (like someone making a theme named 'green-rejected' ... look, it could happen).

Would it be possible to _rename_ the SVN repo to that? I can see cases where you'd want to keep the history.

[dd32]

Replying to joyously:

I'm in favor of this, but does this affect Trac at all? Would there be old tickets pointing to nowhere?

Yes, Old tickets would point to no-longer-existing locations as they unfortunately don't reference exact revisions.

The other issue with themes, is that the existing kind-of-broken keyword searching would return related tickets for both the now-rejected theme and the new theme taking it's place. That's not too much of a problem IMO, as a theme called 'GRE' with theme-gre would already list theme-gre, theme-green, theme-green-garden..

Looking at how to make Trac note the location of the code / tickets are no longer relevant would be a good idea. I'm not afraid of breaking 2+ year old ticket links though, since they're.. I'll be surprised if anyone ever actually looks at them.

Replying to Ipstenu:

We use rejected-PLUGIN-rejected to ensure no possible bad-hits (like someone making a theme named 'green-rejected' ... look, it could happen).

Actually, I think we used that as different code elsewhere expected it to be suffixed or prefixed so we just did both.. but there's no reason why not to do it here either :)

Would it be possible to _rename_ the SVN repo to that? I can see cases where you'd want to keep the history.

Nothing in SVN is ever truely deleted, renaming is possible though. The biggest different is that for a deletion to browse that code you'd have to pull up an old revision of the url in Trac.
Deleting may also benefit in other ways though, like being able to check out themes.svn to pull all themes (don't do that folks) or for themes.trac/browser to actually work again.