Why can’t I delete original user in multisite? Options for manual removal

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So, I’ve been trying to delete the original user for a multisite installation. After removing the super-admin privileges and setting another user to the network admin, I noticed that hitting the delete button from the network user admin would just refresh the page.

I then proceeded to remove this user as the admin user in the General settings of each individual site. Still just a refresh when I try to remove.

This led me to dig into the WordPress code to see why this was happening, and I see that WP is behaving exactly as intended, and that I am programatically prevented from removing the user with ID = 1.

Line 30 of users.php has the following conditional:

if ( $id != '0' && $id != '1' ) {

The delete code simply won’t execute on this user. I can find a way around this, but seeing this baked into the code has me thinking twice about it.

So my question is twofold:

  1. Why is this restriction hard coded? If I’ve got other users with sufficient permissions to do everything, what unforeseen consequences will there be if this user dissappears?
  2. What’s my best strategy for circumventing this? My first thought is just to delete that user’s lines from the user and usermeta table. But it occurs to me I could also change the users ID to make sure the normal WP user removal processes complete. Or is there possibly another option?

1 Answer
1

Don’t delete the user, just change the email, username(optionally) and password in the users table. you can insert a MD5 string in the password field of the users table and WordPress will salt and hash it to a more secure format the first time you log in.

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