In a discussion titled “Best practices: Staff who’ve left,” users share approaches for managing departed staff accounts in Discourse. ganncamp noticed former employees still appear in the staff group and seeks cleanup recommendations. Tris20 suggests anonymizing accounts to comply with GDPR, suspending them to prevent login, and renaming them to generic identifiers like “Former Colleague.” They also propose automating this process using an employee database. Heliosurge recommends stripping elevated privileges (admin, mod, TL4), locking the account at TL0, and deactivating it for security. JammyDodger notes that on Meta, departed team members retain their accounts but lose all staff-related privileges and group memberships, suggesting the approach may vary depending on whether the staff forum is private or public-facing. The thread highlights the need for consistent, secure, and compliant handling of former staff accounts, with automation and role stripping as key considerations.
I’m experimenting with the new leaderboards feature and scrolled to the bottom of the staff leaderboard today.
Looking at the list of accounts with 0 scores really reminded me of all the people who’ve left the company over the last couple years… because they’re still in the staff group in our Discourse instance!
I’m wondering what cleanup on this we could or should be doing.
And insights, recommendations or best practices to share?
Thx!
Our approach:
I’d also be interested to see what other people are doing. I’m tempted to automate this with a script that queries our employee database for recent departures.
If the Staff acvount has elevated user level(admim. Mod, TL4) strip these. And lock TL0. Deactivate Account. For security.
You can also do as the above post mentions.
Here on Meta you get to keep your account as is, but all the ‘Team’ associated stuff, like admin/mod privileges, group membership, etc are removed.
I think it depends on if your ‘staff’ forum is a closed site or part of a public-facing one.