Wrong reason shown why moderator user can't be deleted

Moin · October 17, 2025, 2:50pm

In FIX: Correct user deletion wording by hlashbrooke · Pull Request #34680 · discourse/discourse · GitHub “and moderators” was removed from the note explaining why a user can’t be deleted:

delete_forbidden_because_staff: “Admins ~~and moderators~~ can’t be deleted.”

I understand that this is helpful because moderators can be deleted. But I have the impression that something was overlooked in this adjustment, which confused me today.
My user is a moderator, but not an admin, and still the note said “Admins can’t be deleted”.

…

After checking the code, I think I found why this happens: If a user cannot be deleted, there are two possible reasons:

The user is an admin.
The user has posts older than configured.

The real reason why I couldn’t delete my moderator user was [2], but the reason shown is [1], because while moderators were removed from the text of the warning, the code still checked for staff instead of admin.

github.com/discourse/discourse

app/assets/javascripts/admin/addon/controllers/admin-user/index.js

34c4621ad


      
              });
            }
          }
          
          @discourseComputed("model.canBeDeleted", "model.staff")
          deleteExplanation(canBeDeleted, staff) {
            if (canBeDeleted) {
              return null;
            }
          
            if (staff) {
              return i18n("admin.user.delete_forbidden_because_staff");
            } else {
              return i18n("admin.user.delete_forbidden", {
                count: this.siteSettings.delete_user_max_post_age,
              });
            }
          }
          
          @discourseComputed("model.username")
          postEditsByEditorFilter(username) {

Lilly · October 17, 2025, 3:00pm

yea I can repro this on my hosted test site as well. as soon as I delete the posts for my test moderator account, the “admins can’t be deleted” message is replaced by the delete button. thanks for reporting Moin

tobiaseigen · October 17, 2025, 6:17pm

To clarify further.. a user who is not moderator can’t be deleted and the reason shown is below. The bug is that the wrong reason is shown when the user is a moderator.

Users can’t be deleted if they have posts. Delete all posts before trying to delete a user. (Posts older than 365 days old can’t be deleted.)

Moin · October 17, 2025, 6:32pm

Admins see the wrong reason too. It’s not about who looks at the user’s admin page, but what status the user has that you are looking at.

tobiaseigen · October 17, 2025, 6:34pm

Yeah that’s what I meant but got the sentence structure wrong! I think I fixed it now.

All of this said.. I wonder why it is possible to delete moderators. I think it makes sense to demote users before deleting them and have always done that, and not questioned the UI.

Moin · October 17, 2025, 6:36pm

Thank you. I was concerned that your clarification would lead to misunderstandings, even though I thought the title described the problem quite well.

zogstrip · October 20, 2025, 10:10am

This should hopefully make the UI consistent with the back-end

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/35496

Topic		Replies	Views
Incorrect "Can't delete all posts. Some posts are older than 60 days old." Bug	4	1346	March 5, 2015
Cannot delete user Product Support	37	6651	April 13, 2021
How to prevent user deletion if it has posts Product Support	2	1000	December 18, 2019
Error when attempting to permanently delete as moderator Bug permanently-delete	2	835	April 1, 2022
Visual bugs for staff actions as non-staff user Bug	8	328	February 12, 2025

Wrong reason shown why moderator user can't be deleted

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