This guide explains how to impersonate a user in Discourse and return to your admin account. This is useful when you need to troubleshoot issues faced by a specific user or verify their permissions.
Required user level: Administrator
The admin can choose to impersonate another user when needed. This can be useful when a member is experiencing odd behavior or you need to check their permissions. Impersonating another user acts as if you are logged in as that user. This documentation will guide you through the process of impersonating a user as an admin and how to return to the admin account.
Impersonating a User
Navigate to the Admin section of the sidebar and select Users.
To stop impersonating and return to your admin account, simply log out from the impersonated user account and log back in as the admin.
Logging in and impersonating in a private/incognito window prevents needing to log back in under your main browser session. Just close the window and you’re good to go!
It might be worth noting that impersonating a user is not transparent – it creates a logged visit for that user, and resets any notification flags that are acted on. Probably best to communicate to any real user that it’s being done.
I also ran into this issue. Can we at least add a confirmation dialog on the Impersonate button? Currently it starts the impersonation right away without warning the user of the caveats, especially the one it creates a logged visit.
The other buttons in its vicinity (like Delete user) do have a confirmation dialog. As a user I would expect the Impersonate button to open a dialog just like the others.
I didn’t even note the lack of a confirmation dialog, but yeah, that would be a good place to warn that you’re about to become that user and leave tracks — not just poke around behind the scenes without impact.
This guide explains how to impersonate a user in Discourse and return to your admin account. This is useful when you need to troubleshoot issues faced by a specific user or verify their permissions.
Required user level: Administrator
Logging in and impersonating in a private/incognito window prevents needing to log back in under your main browser session. Just close the window and you’re good to go!
