Reinstating an anonymized user

Support
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As a moderator I am wondering if we can reinstate an account after the user has been anonymized?

I know we can change their name back in the profile. But is it possible to resend an email authorization and their account restarts? Or is their email also wiped out when anonymized?

On our forum, their IP address stays when we anonymize an account.

Thanks for any help. Our admin is not always available for answers.

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Hello @Sassyrocks welcome to meta! :discourse: :wave:

Unfortunately the user will have to create a new account. When you anonymize an account the email is also wiped.

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However, if you do not delete all the posts from the anonymized to user, you can use the merge function to merge the new account with the old account. You can then change the user name of the anonymized account to what they want their user name to be. That seemed to be the solution for me when that happened once.

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Hi I had this issue caused by an unscrupulous mod. If you are admin and have the Anonymized user Email address you can in part restore the user.(partially)

Procedure: (That worked for me)

  1. Change Anon1234 to previous User Name
  2. Edit Email address back in.
  3. Make sure you remove Silence and or suspension
  4. Activate User

This will re add the user and the posts belonging to that Anon1234 will be under the name entered and that account’s stats will be intact (join date, badges. )

The user will likely need to use password reset after clicking on the Email activation. (Restored 2 accounts using this method)

This however will not restore profile info. Ie Real Name, Profile pic etc…

Due to the site not under my full direction, so unable to remove the mod and was looking for ways to limit mod access(for certain mods). However seems to be behaving since they last had a chat with him.

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Thanks all. I am a mod, not admin, on our forum. The merge function is not available to me that I am aware of. But I will run by our admin.

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Your welcome!

Definitely need elevated access for these methods. As I am at the Admin level not sure if Merge User was an admin only or if Mod level has access to this function.

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