I’m sorry but I believe that the PR referenced in this thread is faulty:
This “feature” does not consider the fact that one might use Discourse as a SSO provider and users may not post in the forum but only use the main site! As this scenario is normal for my site I have lost about 70% of users on Discourse in the last months (which I just found out by coincidence)… creating quite a huge gap between the forum and the main site. It’s also normal for my site that users only post in the forum several years after they have decided to create an account to use features on the main site. Now those users cannot login or have to create a new account disconnected from their content on the main site.
I specifically migrated the users with “active: true” several years ago to prevent something like this.
Purge is also something the admin should actively decide on before turning such an option on in my opinion, at least for a already running Discourse forum…
Ugh - what an unfortunate situation to find yourself in. You have my sympathy!
Maybe you can revert to a backup, if not too much new discussion has occurred since the great purge started?
Otherwise yes, I’d recommend adding the users using an import tool. I’m not sure how to do that but you could get help if you post the request in marketplace.
Reflecting on this for my own purposes, I am glad to be reminded of the benefits of doing the reverse - using e.g. WordPress as the SSO provider, so you can benefit from the automatic purging of dormant users on the forum while retaining the users on the main site. The nice thing is that when users log in again they are added again to the forum, without even needing to do anything special. I recently was able to set up logging in by email link in wordpress, which has improved the user experience. WordPress password management is terrible out of the box.
