Invite-registrations for existing users?

Product Support

AI-generated summary

In a Support thread titled “Invite-registrations for existing users?”, lega4 explains they migrated from an old forum to Discourse and want to block public registrations, creating users only via API from their main website. Disabling registrations blocked API-created users too, so they switched to “Invite only” — but existing migrated users now require manual approval on first login. JammyDodger suggests disabling “enable local logins” for SSO, but lega4 clarifies they use no SSO — only API-based user creation and local logins. Moin asks if “approve suspect users” is enabled — lega4 confirms it was, disables it, but the issue persists. Moin then suggests temporarily enabling “must approve users” — which triggers automatic approval of existing users. lega4 confirms this worked: no more approval requests appeared, solving the problem. The key takeaway is that enabling “must approve users” temporarily can bulk-approve existing users during migration, even if they were previously flagged for manual review.

1

I have migrated from my old forum engine to Discourse. I wanted to prohibit registrations, as the user creation is handled from my main website (via API request), so the forum account created together with user account on the main website.

However when I was enabling “disable registration”, it didn’t allow me to create users even from API. So I switched to “INvite only”, this seems to work, however I got the problem - all existing (who were migrated from old forum) users now need approval before their first login. For new users it seems fine. How can I “bulk approve” all thousands of existing users and why do I get this message at all?

2

I think you want to disable enable local logins if you’d like your SSO to handle it, rather than disabling registrations entirely.

3

Maybe i wrote it somehow unclear

This means I create a user in Discourse via API at the time of them creating an account on the website. I don’t have any kind of “SSO”. It’s pure one single API request.

And I do want to actually prohibit non-API registrations. “local logins” is the only way users can log in, as I don’t have any SSO-stuff.

4

Is the approve suspect users setting enabled?

Add suspicious users to the review queue. Suspicious users have entered a bio/website but have no reading activity.

Maybe that is why you need to approve them :thinking:

5

Wow, that was indeed enabled! Disabled it now, let’s see whether it helps, thanks!

6

Unfortunately not, existing users still pop up as requiring approval even though this setting is disabled now…

7

When you enable must approve users, all existing users are approved automatically.

Maybe it works to temporarily enable that to use the automation to approve your users.

8

Did it yesterday and haven’t seen a single approve request so far! So it seems this was exactly the trick, thanks!