Delete Wiki user
Asked by barry austin:

Hi Guys,

I am trying to delete a user. I have reached the maximum of 25 users, however, some people have since left the company. When I try to delete them I get an error saying "The following error(s) occurred:This user can not be removed

\<\< Return to view user: USERNAME

USERNAME can not be removed because he or she has authored content in one or more spaces.

The user has edited pages in the following spaces

- Technical Operations Team (Tech Ops)"

I assume I cant delete the user as he has made changes or created pages. Is there any way around this?


Answers:
author: Andrew Frayling
body: Hi,

If you remove the users from any groups they are associated with (in particular) confluence-users they do not get counted against your license. After removing the users from their groups you should then be able to add new users up to your license count.

A lot of people create a new group called confluence-users-left and add the users that have left to that group so they can keep track of old users that may have authored content, but have since left.

Hope that helps,

Andrew.

comments: author: barry austin
body: Perfect,

Thank you very much


author: Barbara Green
body: You can also **Disable** the user, which does the same thing. They will not count against your number of users whether disabled or removed. (<http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Removing+or+Deactivating+a+User>).

I like the idea of a group for disabled users, but I also wonder if you can clean up the mess by copying the space without selecting the "use current authors" option. Would that remove the author label that prevents you from removing the users? (You would have delete the original space, and then copy the copy back to the original space key. Maybe more trouble than it's worth?)

Barbara

comments: author: Alejandro Conde Carrillo
body: There is actually a bug, [CONF-24969](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-24969 "Disabled user still counts towards license limit "), and disabled users still count for the license. You need to remove all group memberships with "can use" permission.


author: BernardoA
body: Actually you can add this same user in your LDAP, so you can first deactivate this internal user from you confluence database which will no longer have "can use" permission and also will not count against the license as we can see in this following example:

UPDATE cwd_user SET active = 'F' WHERE user_name in ('john', 'james', 'peter')  


author: Daniel Borcherding
body: I would also add that deleting a user from an external user direcotry like LDAP or Crowd can be very problematic. It is far better to add everyone that no longer needs access to a group without the can use permission as outlined above.


author: Mauricio Gutierrez
body: Hello!

I'm not sure if removing the "can use" permissions will actually exclude a contact from the total count for the wiki.

I have been able to delete the user by erasing all the trace they have left, this is not a good approach but it works 99% of the times. Right now I have 1 user disabled and he's got no trace (content written-comments-whatever) in the wiki and still I cannot remove it.

I'm not sure what to do next.


Tags: user