Long after running a migration import test I noticed that hundreds of accounts were removed. I know that Discourse does housekeeping to suspend unused accounts or to delete newly opened accounts that were never used.
At what point would the accounts on my system have been removed? Is that done precisely at the time of import or is it left to be automatically handled by housekeeping?
I’m in the situation where I would prefer to keep all accounts for a period after migration and give people notice to use or lose their accounts. Recreating hundreds of accounts by invitation is going to be very painful. I have to run the import on a new system anyway, so I’ve got an opportunity to handle this situation if there is a way to address it.
I think some import scripts delete user accounts with no posts; those would be deleted at the end of the import script. Also discourse will remove accounts with no posts and no logins after some amount of time; those would be in the /admin/logs.
Because these are in admin/logs, you suggest that this is perhaps housekeeping - deletion might have occurred hours after import. If I can set the time factor for stale accounts, I might be able to delay the auto-delete.
Yes. See clean up inactive users after days site setting. “Number of days before an inactive user (trust level 0 without any posts) is removed. To disable clean up set to 0.”
