Handle demoted Authors better

[benmyhre]

Users that have author permissions should be able to no longer be authors, but still have the authorship of a post attributed to them.

Not being a current author in an org does not remove that person's ability of having authored that post.

With current functionality, when you edit a post that had a demoted author, it puts in (seemingly)random user with author permissions and doesn't even make it clear that random person is becoming the author.

Even if the community doesn't feel a demoted author should not be able to retain authorship, this transfer should be more elegant. If that person can't be an author, WordPress breaks its own logic by allowing the demoted author to exist as published author on a post prior to a post being edited and forcing a new author.

Steps

1. Create post and publish as an Author X.
2. Delete Author X or change the role of Author X to something that does not have author privileges
3. Edit post.
4. Save changes.
5. Look at author.

Expected results:

Either the author to remain unless manually changed.

[johnbillion]

Thanks for the report @benmyhre and welcome.

I've tested this with the block editor, the classic editor, and the Quick Edit functionality and they all appear to work as expected, even though the UI in the block editor does not correctly display the name of the demoted author.

Have you tested this with all your plugins deactivated and one of the default themes such as Twenty Twenty in use?

Cheers!

[johnbillion]

Also bear in mind that deleting a user is very different from demoting the user to a role that cannot author content. Deleting a user cannot by its nature result in attribution being retained, but demoting the user should work as expected.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Hi there, welcome to WordPress Trac! Thanks for the report.

This appears to be a duplicate of #50754, see also #49269 and #51790.