I have successfully imported several thousand emails from Yahoogroups.com. Each import created a system approved user with username and email from the import. I have contacted each import and provided a means of new forum membership.
My problem is how to handle the remaining old users that did not respond to the invitation. The forum is is genealogical so I do not want to delete old emails or removing users because will
Users shouldn’t (won’t) be auto-removed if they have posts by default. It is a weird state because you have unvalidated users with posts but it should be safe.
@codinghorror thanks for the response. Yes, I don’t see a problem with safety. It appears that those old accounts with imported emails can be deactivated without any problems. But that leaves several hundred accounts on the user list, many as much as 22 years old. These old accounts display as greyed and gravitate to the bottom of the user list. Is there another option I may be missing? Deactivation is doable but it seems to leave unneeded and unwanted baggage and complexity. Could deactivated accounts be moved to a deactivated user list? I would think this to be a common issue with all forums.
EDIT: I forgot to mention a similar situation likely occurs when a member quits or is deceased which must happen often. Yet the only option is deactivation.
It’s an issue with migrated forums, perhaps – but if a user hasn’t been around for 10+ years, why would it be weird to assume their email from the migration is no longer valid?
The posts are still there, the user is still there … what’s the actual problem here?
It wouldn’t; but I would prefer to have another option. I have 268 non-current member accounts 10+ years old. More than the number of active accounts. I’ll try deactivating a few of the oldest to see what happens. On further investigation, it appears suspension might be a better option so will test both.