Best way to create feedback mechanism on user profile

But only 9 comments are actually visible in the list. It seems perhaps that comments from members who are no longer active members (and their profiles have been deleted) are showing in the total comments but their comments are not actually visible?

Comment counting uses a fast count. It has to do this for performance reasons otherwise counter display would cripple sites causing double the load times. It doesn't perform advanced access checks or anything like that. It's just a raw count. So yes it can be inaccurate.

How can we get it to show all comments, even if the users who made the comments are no longer in the comprofiler/user database?

CB Activity can't show comments for deleted users as it currently does not support anonymous posts. Deleted user comments shouldn't even exist since by default CB Activity will clear their activity when their user is deleted, but since you used SQL to directly insert those they exist. I suggest clearing out comments for users that don't exist.

We are using the comment function of activities as our feedback mechanism. We want to keep comments visible on the customers profile regardless of whether the user who left the comment is still in the database. Is there no way to retain those comments and have them be visible, even if the commenter is no longer an active member?

Is there no way to retain those comments and have them be visible, even if the commenter is no longer an active member?

No. CB Activity does not allow for anonymous posts, which is what those are when the user is deleted. It will support this functionality in the future, but currently it does not.

What is the minimum necessary to allow viewing of older comments by members? Is it simply that a record exists in the user database with their user id / username? We will not allow previous comments to disappear, so please tell us how CB Activities determines whether a user exists or not. Is it from the user database? Is it from the comprofiler database? What field, exactly, is CB Activities looking at to determine whether or not to display comments from the user?

It's hardcoded into CB Activity queries. You will not be able to remove that functionality without causing unforeseen issues throughout the plugin. Public posts are not supported at this time. It joins both the _comprofiler and _users table verifying they exist and that they're approved/confirmed.

Is there something inside the vast tool kit of Community Builder that would allow me to recreate an old messages list for each user? It would be separate from CB Activities, which we will use going forward for our feedback mechanism. But if we wanted to create a kind of history/archive listing of comments from past users (many of whom no longer have active accounts), is there a particular CB tool that we should look at? Since we still have all of the old feedback data in the database.

I was thinking of trying to create a new CB List and use the Filter function to do this, but it seems that the List creation tool only has access to comprofiler and user database fields.