# Set all anonymized user names to common "deleted user"
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/set-all-anonymized-user-names-to-common-deleted-user/216631
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [January 31, 2022, 8:57pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/set-all-anonymized-user-names-to-common-deleted-user/216631 "2022-01-31T20:57:05Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@thea](https://meta.discourse.org/u/thea)
#### Post date: [January 31, 2022, 8:57pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/set-all-anonymized-user-names-to-common-deleted-user/216631/1 "2022-01-31T20:57:05Z")
I am wondering how you can configure Discourse to give all anonymized users a common username such as “deleted user” or “anonymized user”, instead of having unique anonymized usernames.
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### Author:  [@Don](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Don)
#### Post date: [January 31, 2022, 9:04pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/set-all-anonymized-user-names-to-common-deleted-user/216631/2 "2022-01-31T21:04:38Z")
As admin you can change their username manually. Just go to their profile and edit the username. 🙂 But I believe it should be unique as well so maybe just rewrite the anon to deleted\_user and keep the numbers.
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### Author:  [@Simon\_Manning](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Simon_Manning)
#### Post date: [January 31, 2022, 9:47pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/set-all-anonymized-user-names-to-common-deleted-user/216631/3 "2022-01-31T21:47:39Z")
Users can be merged so you can change the username of one anonymized user to deleted\_user as @Don suggests, then merge all other anonymized users into deleted\_user.
When you want to do this in future, anonymize the user first and then merge into deleted\_user. It’s important to anonymize the user first because the account being merged into will take on the email address as its secondary email address.
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### Author:  [@thea](https://meta.discourse.org/u/thea)
#### Post date: [January 31, 2022, 10:17pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/set-all-anonymized-user-names-to-common-deleted-user/216631/4 "2022-01-31T22:17:13Z")
> [@Simon\_Manning](#):
>
> When you want to do this in future, anonymize the user first and then merge into deleted\_user. It’s important to anonymize the user first because the account being merged into will take on the email address as its secondary email address.
I see - think that could be managed via API?
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### Author:  [@Simon\_Manning](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Simon_Manning)
#### Post date: [February 1, 2022, 2:26pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/set-all-anonymized-user-names-to-common-deleted-user/216631/5 "2022-02-01T14:26:33Z")
I expect the answer is yes but I only see API documentation for anonymizing users, not merging them, so I will go with probably. For merging there may be existing topics about it or there is this:
> [@Reverse engineer the Discourse API](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-reverse-engineer-the-discourse-api/20576):
>
> Discourse is backed by a complete JSON api. Anything you can do on the site you can also do using the JSON api. The API is documented at [docs.discourse.org](https://docs.discourse.org). You can also use the [discourse\_api](https://github.com/discourse/discourse_api) Ruby gem as a client library. However, not every endpoint is documented. To determine how to do something with the JSON API here are some steps you can follow. Example: recategorize a topic. Go to a topic and start editing a category: Open Chrome dev tools, switch to the Network tab, select …