Bulk deactivation of inactive users

Support
1

I migrated about 250 users that I’d now like to mark as inactive because they haven’t visited the forum in quite some time. Is there a way to bulk deactivate users with a ‘last seen’ date prior to some date?

My goal is to prevent emails from sending to these users. I think deactivation is the correct status because it would allow those users to re-activate if they want - correct?

2

A simpler solution might be to adjust suppress digest email after days. They’d still be “active” but they’d stop getting notices.

But, if you want, it’s something like this:

cd /var/discourse
./launcher enter app
rails c
User.where("last_seen_at < '2016-01-01'").update_all(active: false)
exit
exit
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3

That setting seems to only impact digest emails. Many of the categories are setup as “watch” by default, so users are getting per-post emails - not digest. Do I understand that correctly?

EDIT: I see emails going out to users that have been inactive for more than 365 days.

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4

I think you’re right. The code I provided, though untested, should do what you want. You should backup your database before trying it.

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5

Quick follow up. This script worked perfectly! I tested it in a demo environment first.

Two minor suggestions:

  1. I added “and active = true” to the where criteria because I wasn’t sure if there’d be side effects to deactivating an inactive user.
  2. People that come across this post is the future may want to consider adding “and id > 0” to prevent updating the system and discobot users (though I didn’t do this myself because they were within my last_seen_at window.) It doesn’t appear that their last_seen_at is updated after the accounts are created.
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6

Since this is an old topic is bulk deactivation of inactive users now a feature of discourse or do you still need to run @pfaffman code as the only solution?

7

I think there’s a plugin now which you may find useful:

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8

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