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Question

Workarounds for deactivating a community account?

  • 23 January 2021
  • 4 replies
  • 67 views

One of our superusers is stepping down from her leadership role and taking an indefinite break from the community altogether.

She's asked us to remove her from the community so she's not tempted to check it and re-engage in discussions. 

She’s not asking us to remove the content she posted. (I don’t want to use the Erase User feature.)

The only other option I see is to use the Ban User feature, as this preserves the account’s past activity.

Does this sound right? Is this the best (only) workaround since there’s no ‘deactivate’ option?

There are multiple ways to do this, depending on your preference:

  • Erasing a user will not delete the content published, it will merely change the username to “Anonymous”, so that it is not linked to an individual user any more. A downside is that this could affect the readability of threads. It will delete private message conversations however, but I am not sure if this is relevant.
  • Banning a user will hinder the user from logging in again with this account. Further there are no downsides with this option, maybe on analytics as the user will not show up as a registered user any more.
  • A third way could be that you alter the account details, so that the user cannot log in any more. If you are using the inSided login, you could change the password & email in the user profile page to something else. Or if you use an SSO login, you could change or delete the SSO ID / token field and change the email address. This way the account would not be accessible any more. Downside here is that the user might be able to re-register with a fresh account using the SSO credentials, but this is also possible in general of course.

I hope that this will make your decision easier, if there are any other questions or things I can help you with, just let me know!

Thanks, @Julian. We don’t want a former community leader to show as ‘Anonymous,’ which is why I didn’t use option 1. Option 3 is a good option for future use, though in this case I think I’ll stick with option 2, as the individual doesn’t want to see content if she goes to our community and we have it set up so posts aren’t visible to banned users. 

Hi @Julian , assume a banned user’s content remains intact (including personal details?)

Yes, that is true. Only the access (login) will be blocked, content, profile information etc. will remain as it is. Actually, I often see spammers also adding spammy stuff to their signature and profile fields. As this is not being deleted when you remove their spam, I would also recommend to check on this to make sure it’s beig removed so they don’t achieve their goals.

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