How does discourse count users?

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

I think this should answer most of your questions

Understanding user statuses, roles, and permissions

This is a guide for understanding the various user statuses, roles, and permissions within Discourse, including how they affect user capabilities and how they are stored in the database. Required user level: Administrator Discourse has many built-in user statuses, roles, and permissions. These statuses and roles can be seen for a given user when viewing their profile from the users’ section of the admin dashboard: [admin-dashboard-user-permissions] Permi…

There are a few other faqs as well about this.