How do I remove double users when they are not visible in the admin panel?
Asked by Yannick De Coster:

One of our users (Alex) shows up 5 times when you try to assign a task to him in Confluence with '@\[username\]'. His account however is only registered once in the admin panel. How do I fix this?

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Answers:
author: Deividi Luvison
body: In that case can you please open a case on support.atlassian.com for further investigation?  
Thanks and Regards,  
David\| The Engineer that like Windows for realsies.


author: Deividi Luvison
body: Ok, Let's try a rebuild from your plugins from scratch:

1. **Backup your production database and application directories (\<Confluence Home\>\\\<Confluence INSTALL\>) or take a vm snapshot if both the app and database are in the same server.**
2. **Review step 1 (backups, backups and more backups).**
3. Take note of all your third party add ons.
4. Shutdown Confluence.
5. Delete the following directories.
6. \<confluence-home\>/bundled-plugins folder
7. \<confluence-home\>/plugins-cache folder
8. \<confluence-home\>/plugins-osgi-cache folder
9. \<confluence-home\>/plugins-temp folder.
10. Run the command "**delete from PLUGINDATA;**" against your Confluence database.
11. Now run "**UPDATE BANDANA SET BANDANAVALUE='\<map/\>' WHERE BANDANAKEY='plugin.manager.state.Map';**"
12. Also delete the directories described in the rebuild index from scratch guide.
13. Start Confluence.
14. Go to Confluence Admin \> Content Indexing.
15. Rebuild the index trough the UI.
16. Check for the behaviour again.  

The idea behind this procedure is to delete all the plugins from scratch so we confirm that there are no corruptions with confluence bundle plugins.

If after this the addition users vanish, re install your third party plugins and disable the following plugins (since those got enabled due the UPDATE statement):

* [Global Activity](https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Viewing+Site+Statistics) (if you are not using
* Confluence Email Gateway

If it fails you can restore your backups, again I would prefer to mount a staging environment since you might get a downtime while checking this :smile:.  
Let me know how it goes.  
Thanks and Regards,  
David\| The Engineer that like Windows for realsies.

comments: author: Yannick De Coster
body: Have followed every step but the problem persists.


author: Deividi Luvison
body: Hey Yannic,

That could be some corruption in your confluence index, could you please try following below guide and see if the problem goes away:

<https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFKB/Rebuild+the+Content+Indices+from+Scratch>

tks,

David


author: Yannick De Coster
body: Hi Deividi,

I first tried the rebuild option in the admin panel but no success.

Then followed the steps 'rebuilding the content indices from scratch' but we have no index directory so I could not remove it :smile:

Any other ideas?

Thanks,

Y.

comments: author: Deividi Luvison
body: Ok, now that is really strange, you should have a index directory because even if you remove it, confluence would recreate this directory, please go to the Confluence Admin \> System Information. Check what path is described next to \*Confluence Home\* variable. If in that directory there is no index folder send us a screenshot please, else try the procedure I posted.


author: Yannick De Coster
body: Ok, found the index directory and deleted it. After rebuild, no luck: still 5 Alexes...


author: Deividi Luvison
body: Interesting, can you run the below select and post me the output?select u.user_name, u.active, d.directory_name from cwd_user u inner join cwd_directory d on d.id = u.directory_idwhere u.user_name = 'iLex';


author: Yannick De Coster
body: \[confluence\]\> select u.user_name, u.active, d.directory_name from cwd_user u inner join cwd_directory d on d.id = u.directory_id where u.user_name = 'iLex';+-----------+--------+-------------------------------+\| user_name \| active \| directory_name \|+-----------+--------+-------------------------------+\| iLex \| T \| Confluence Internal Directory \|+-----------+--------+-------------------------------+1 row in set (0.00 sec)


author: Deividi Luvison
body: There is one last thing we can try (last resort), do you have a test instance (prod clone) available?


author: Yannick De Coster
body: We are not running a mirrored environment. What would be your suggestion? We can always make a back-up before attempting anything crazy =)


Tags: confluence-administration