I was playing around with ideas today for how to automatically show that a user of our forum has left the organization. This was something we had in one of our previous solutions (Socialcast added an “Alumni” icon over users’ avatars who were no longer active). It helped other users understand quickly that they should be directing their posts to someone else when following up on an older thread with people who are no longer around.
One promising avenue is to detect when their emails start bouncing. We can adjust the site settings for “hard bounce score” and “bounce score threshold deactivate” to deactivate the user after a few bounced emails.
But I haven’t yet found a way to easily make the fact that a user has been deactivated visible to other users.
From what I can tell so far, the active/inactive bool isn’t returned in the normal user json response for a user.
I looked into adding a custom badge query to grant these users a gold “Alumni” badge, but realized badge queries are currently disabled by default now for security reasons.
Doing something with “avatar flair” by adding them to a group would be cool too, as that way it’d be much more obvious that the user is no longer around.
Does this sound like something useful to others?
Has anyone else done something like this or have any ideas for ways to approach this?
