Indicate member is deactivated on their usercard and/or avatar

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was something we had in one of our previous solutions (Socialcast added an “Alumni” icon over users’ avatars who were no longer active).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?

6 Likes

Hi Dave. I just came here to search for a similar question and found this thread.

I just want to show something visually for users who’ve been deactivated but who still have posts on the site so people understand why they can’t Private Message them etc.

For the version of Discourse we have at the moment (1.9.2), the user’s avatar and name looks just like everyone else’s in a thread but if you try to click on their username absolutely nothing happens.

Have you found a good solution? If I find one, I’ll reply back here.

2 Likes

I didn’t explore much beyond what I described above, so I don’t have any better ideas at the moment. But if you find something that works, I’m still interested :slight_smile:

Code is already in place to not show the message button for TLO members, so I think a conditional testing for “activated” added to guardian could work.

2 Likes