Ability to bulk-delete old incomplete submissions

[pmangahis]

Describe the problem you would like to solve
We've received 2 requests from hosted clients to have a multi-select option to remove incomplete submissions.

Describe the solution you'd like
Currently, JMs need to delete incomplete submissions from authors and QuickSubmit plugin.

Who is asking for this feature?
Journal Editors, Journal Manager

[NateWr]

Thanks @pmangahis. Can you say a little bit more about the use-case and the steps that editors are taking? I assume that editors/managers are identifying old incomplete submissions in some way before deciding what to remove. How do they determine which ones to remove? Why do they feel they need to remove them?

[pmangahis]

In one case the journal was doing a manual import from BePress using the QuickSubmit plugin. I think when there is an error during the submission process using QuickSubmit it still creates a record. They want to be able to remove duplicates.

In the other journal, it seems that the journal has multiple pages (over 10) of incomplete submissions from what I can tell were the authors created that the JM would like to remove.

[NateWr]

Thanks! I think the QuickSubmit issue is probably something that we should address at its source. With the incomplete submissions, do you know if these were done by a single malicious user or spam bot? Or had they just accumulated over many years?

[pmangahis]

I think it might be both cases for the other journal.

[carolinatanigushi]

We also have this issue on our installations.

Journals have previously let us know that there are a lot of abandoned submissions that they need to manually delete. It's an issue on our OPS installation as well, considering that out of our 357 currently active submissions, 239 have not been touched on the last six months.

[jnugent]

Just to add 0.02 to this from the systems side. We've been able to clean out incomplete submissions by using the following logic:

1. We identify old and stale incomplete submissions by looking at the submissions table and querying based on submission_progress > 0 and a date_last_activity that is older than a determined threshold with the client.
2. These submission ids are put into a text file and iterated over on the command line in a shell script and passed to the tools/deleteSubmissions.php tool.
3. In 3.3, before we can do this we need to comment out the code in the submission file service that logs file deletions because of this issue File logging still occurs when deleting a submission or context #7597

But this does seem to work for us. We've a few clients that are very old and have a long history with OJS 2 and now have upwards of a thousand incomplete submissions accumulated over the years, so it's nice to be able to clean these out.

Jason

[librariam]

In addition to Jason's script suggestion above, for a use case with a smaller number of incomplete submissions - I wonder if it would make sense to bring back the old submission "Delete" button for admin accounts only (before a submission is declined)? I understand the reason for removing it for JE/JM accounts, but having an admin delete submissions quickly would be very helpful.