Was there a recent change that is leading to the influx of generic users named “userN” (where N is some number) on our Discourse instance and if so it possible to disable this? I haven’t been able to find anything in the settings.

We recently stopped using email addresses when generating usernames during SSO. https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/88ecb83382e4dc5cec1d9599619a6c40a07825ae The recommended solution is to supply a username in the SSO payload. You can go back to the previous behaviour by changing a hidden site setting, but we might remove it in the future. ./launcher enter app rails c SiteSetting.use_email_for_username_and_name_suggestions = true

Those accounts might’ve been anonymized at some point in time. [image] Anonymizing Users in Discourse megaphoneAnnouncements If you want to permanently remove a user from your community, but also preserve their contributions to Discourse, you can anonymize that user. How do I anonymize a user? At the bottom of a user’s admin page, there is an “Anonymize User” button: [image] You’ll be asked to confirm. If you agree, the user will be anonymized. How thorough is the anonymization? The user will no longer be able to log in to your community as this specific account. A new username will be randomly assigned to t…

They’re all new users asking their first question, I don’t think they’ve been anonymized by an admin. Edit: or just new users, not necessarily with a post.

What method are these new users using to sign-up?

I’m not sure, is there somewhere I can check that? It seems all these users have empty username details in the DiscourseConnect SSO section at the bottom of the User Admin page, if that means anything. [image]

Do you have groups with the same names? This sounds similar to [image] Username changed after Discourse upgrade Support There is likely a group with the name martin. Users and groups cannot share the same name. There was previously a bug which allowed this to happen, but it has now been fixed - that’s why your username has been changed automatically. We should probably update the error message here to make it clear that a username must not match any group names. Added to my list to investigate

There is no group called “user”.

[image] kevinherron: It seems all these users have empty username details in the DiscourseConnect SSO section at the bottom of the User Admin page, if that means anything. Can you check your discourse connect sign-up and see if the username field can be skipped when registering?

I’ll have to check with the internal systems team that manages our global user accounts and I assume the integration with Discourse Connect SSO. I suspect the issue is somewhere in here… just not sure why the sudden behavior change. I don’t think our global accounts have usernames, just emails, but this issue seems to have just popped up. Anyway it’ll be a few hours before anybody is actually online. I’m up waaaay early.

So if our user accounts don’t have usernames and we just supply the email address in the username field of the SSO payload it will behave as it did previously?

[image] kevinherron: So if our user accounts don’t have usernames and we just supply the email address in the username field of the SSO payload it will behave as it did previously? Yes, that should work. But it’s better to avoid generating usernames from emails because in this case, it’s easy to figure out emails of your users. This is insecure. Note, that you can also send a full name in the name field to SSO. If you do so: name will become the full name of a user on your Discourse name will be used by SSO for generating username

Generic “userN” usernames

Product Support

anon73664359 October 27, 2021, 11:01am 2

Those accounts might’ve been anonymized at some point in time.

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Usernames getting modified – numeral "1" being added SSO	4	1443	September 11, 2018
Bad automatic choosing of username when using SSO (DiscourseConnect) SSO	1	945	August 18, 2022
Anonymise all users by default during sign up Product Support	4	450	November 18, 2024
Can usernames be numbers instead of Letters? Product Support	7	2552	January 7, 2022
Usernames suddenly have 1 appended to end Product Support	3	574	August 15, 2018

Generic “userN” usernames

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