I’m getting situations where people need to change their email address but can’t get into Discourse to do it themselves, and are asking me, the admin, to do it for them. But I can’t see any way to do that, and so now I’ve got people who can’t get into the site. Is there a way for me to change a user…

[image] adrelanos: Discourse sends a verification e-mail to the old e-mail address which will never arrive. Hence, e-mail cannot be updated. If you have access to the site’s rails console, you can change email addresses without triggering a confirmation email. Enter the docker container and …

I figured it out, enough to solve my immediate problem anyway. I’m not sure it’s the best way to solve it, but if I impersonate the user, I can then change the address. I think an admin should probably have this ability, but it doesn’t come up that much, so I can live with this for now.

FYI:This was also recently discussed in a similar topic here although not 100% specific to your question: [image] How can I manually change a User password? Support A user put a wrong email and forgot his password. How can I manually change his password? …

Hmm, that thread does show a better way to do it. But why would it make sense to allow an admin to edit the user’s email address from the user’s preferences page (/users/{user}/preferences), but not the admin page for the same user (/admin/users/{user}). Surely the permissions should be the same on …

Slightly off-topic, But I’m curious. As email address is the primary way of establishing a member’s identity, how is one able to know that “member A” is not trying to get at “member B’s” account?

I guess the admin would have to use his/her discretion. In this case, the user was abc@domain.com, and the entry in the db was {SPACE}abc@domain.com, and that leading space apparently matters. So it was pretty clear that I just needed to delete the space and fix an obvious typo. Also, Discourse sho…

How did that leading space get in there? Did the user enter it?

Actually the user was created via a script calling the /users endpoint in the API, with data entered by the user, so really it’s a validation bug in my script, but probably the API should protect against this as well.

You are probably right given the importance of email. @techAPJ can you make sure the API guards against (strips) extra leading or trailing spaces when entering emails? Perhaps it could be part of the validation steps somehow.

Just pushed a fix: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/3150

To come back to the original question, I am trying to achieve the same thing: change a user email. However I am trying to do this via the API. Looking at the documentation it seems possible via: users/:username/preferences/email However looking at Discourse code it seems that this will trigger a j…

Can an admin change a user's email address?

Support

DeanMarkTaylor (Dean Taylor) January 28, 2015, 11:01pm 3

FYI:This was also recently discussed in a similar topic here although not 100% specific to your question:

Topic		Replies	Views
Allow admins to change email addresses easily Feature	9	5387	January 18, 2022
Can an admin change his email address? Support	9	751	January 28, 2022
Changing email addresses not working as an Admin Support email	11	316	October 1, 2024
How to change email if access to old email is no longer available? Support	19	6606	September 5, 2022
How to change the admin email Support email	25	1603	October 6, 2023

Can an admin change a user's email address?

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