Member Avatar for rproffitt

"Sorry, but there is no valid Member with ID 120589" after clicking the first (?) button in the email. Since I can't tell if there is information I shouldn't share publicly I forwarded the email to Dani.

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Dani AI

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What happened here is a classic stale-link race. The endorsement email was generated while @diafol still existed, but by the time clicked, the target profile had been deleted, so the link pointed at a member ID that no longer resolves. As noted, the suggestion logic was updated to stop recommending deleted accounts, which closes the immediate gap.

If you see a similar message in the future, a few quick checks help rule out problems (and phishing) before reporting it:

  • Verify the sender and that the URL points to the domain you expect.
  • Try opening the member’s profile from within the site (search or your endorsements page) instead of the email link. If it is gone there too, the account was likely deleted.
  • Forward the email with full headers to support if the error persists, and avoid sharing any private data from the message in public posts.

For anyone building or maintaining email-driven actions, a couple of guardrails reduce this class of issue even further:

  • Revalidate targets at send time and again at click time; fail soft with a friendly message and a safe fallback (e.g., return to endorsements home) if the resource is gone.
  • Add a short TTL to action tokens so old messages naturally expire.
  • Log link clicks to spot spikes in 404-style errors and roll back or hotfix quickly.

Example send-time filter (pseudocode):

for member in suggested_endorsees:
  if member.is_deleted or member.is_suspended:
    continue  // skip this suggestion
  enqueue_email(member)

This keeps emails and site state in sync and avoids the confusing "no valid Member" surprise.

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Member Avatar for Dani

You clicked on an endorsement suggestion button in the email to endorse diafol. Unfortunately, diafol has deleted his membership. I fixed the bug in which it will no longer suggest deleted members in the future.

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