As I discussed here, @yanokwa and I just migrated a list with about 3k users using the experimental mbox importer. This script imports all users as staged users meaning they can’t use the password reset feature. As far as we could tell, we had two options:
- leave users staged and have community members create new users. When creating a new user, they would get no feedback on whether the email address they used matched an existing user so the risk of them creating users unrelated to their own staged user would be high. Also, they wouldn’t be able to use the same username as their staged user.
- unstage users so community members could use the password reset feature and get confirmation that they were using the same email address as they used on the old list. They would start receiving email from Discourse before explicitly claiming their account.
We ended up going with the second option and so far it seems like it hasn’t caused too much confusion. That said, it would have been ideal if staged users could reset their passwords to claim their full accounts.