I have some users who are inactive for months or years. What to do with them? I don’t want to delete them because they have made posts. I only just figured this out after looking into why certain emails have been failing for months.
Advice welcome!
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Perhaps deactivate users? IIRC their posts will still be kept.
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Do you mean the Activity Summary emails?
If you are sure they are never coming back isn’t anonymizing the better choice?
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What would be the advantage of anonymizing the user here? I’m curious. Also if the user comes back… what then? Creating a new user and merging?
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Fair point. I was thinking if someone has been inactive for years then it is pretty unlikely they will come back.
But you never know…stranger things have happened before.
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Leave them be. Do not change a user record unnecessarily.
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The only change I would make would be to lock them into a lower trust level such as level 0 or level 1.
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I’d avoid deleting/deactivating too – but if emails are failing anyway, is there any downside to changing their email settings?
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@NateDhaliwal I’ve seen u use iirc what is that?
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IIRC = If I Recall Correctly
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Just for your information, on this topic I enhance that the number of users may be misleading and I too wonder what to do about inactive users.
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Write it into the guidelines, at least as a reminder first, to avoid accidental deletion, right?
I see users regularly signing up but never posting or logging on. I remove those on the basis they’ve not been seen for over a year and have never posted. They can always sign up again and not harm done to the forum content.
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Why don’t you let the cleanup job delete them automatically?
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Mostly because I didn’t know (or had completely forgotten) about that setting. 
Discourse is one step ahead of me, again.
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I suppose it wasn’t mentioned in this topic before because Andrew was talking about users with posts.
Look for the Clean up inactive users after days setting, it’s configurable.
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I can see this is handy for some use-cases, but just to note, I’ve disabled the auto-cleanup and I prefer to keep all accounts (other than spammers of course.) For one reason, my community started as a migration, and many accounts were inherited from the initial import, and they are real people who were at one point interested and active in the subject matter. It just so happens that they never (yet) became active in the new location.
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I also keep my inactive users around. I think it’s slowly a question of what type of community you are managing. In mine, diabetic cats go into remission, or people become so autonomous they do not need the community anymore, and then something happens, the cat comes out of remission, or whatever, and people suddenly reappear after a couple of years of silence. In one such case, actually, the member was not that involved during her first stint in the community, but was much more so the second time around, to the point that she became a moderator. I don’t see much of an upside of cleaning up for cleaning up’s sake.
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I had a similar situation with one user who was quite active, then suddenly nothing for over 12 months. It turned out his job sent him overseas and he was quite busy. When he returned home he popped right back on the forum. 
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