I am using Discourse as a discussion platform for my students and classes. We are now approaching the beginning of another school year, so I need to deactivate the accounts of students who are no longer studying the courses (and should no longer have access to the forum).
I can’t delete the users, as that would require all their posts to be deleted (and I want to maintain a full history of previous threads, and if posts disappeared it would make the threads quite jumpy).
However, I need some way of preventing those users from logging in and using the system, and also from receiving any emails (e.g. if they are mentioned, digest emails, etc.).
So, I wanted to ask what are my options here? The closest seems to be suspending the user for a long period of time (like 10 years) but is there a better and neater way? Would the suspended users still receive emails from the system?
Unfortunately I think suspending the users is the only way you can accomplish what you want here. Based on @sam’s description of the user states I think suspending is the way to go. From the linked thread:
So this will accomplish your goal of preventing login and emails, unless you (the admin) explicitly initiate an email.
You can also anonymize each account unless you need to keep their actual name with their posts.
You can use the deactivate account button on the admin user page too. You may have to alter their email preferences to stop emails though (such as the digest)
Thanks for your replies @jomaxro and @cpradio . I am thinking that I will take the route of suspending the users for a long time which will effectively disable their accounts without modifying the content already on the forum.