Sorry to bump, but wanted to see if anyone might have an idea about this. Our users are created via SSO so this field is not checked by default. When user go to edit their preferences, the changes won’t save because this checkbox is not checked (since it never was). It’d be much better if we could get rid of it altogether. (Or at least have SSO check it somehow for us.)
If you’re not using the user field you should be able to delete it.
The IDs in the database should stay the same, they are the IDs of the user_fields table, not the sequential order of the fields. user_field_1 should never be reused.