How do you remove a user from Confluence that was created by LDAP?
Asked by LizN:

I've looked at numerous other issues on here and I understand why the "Disable" and "Delete" buttons would be deactivated for users who were added through an outside LDAP. However, we are finding that users who are deleted from that outside LDAP are not being deactivated or deleted from the system. They are still showing up in Administer Users, People Directory and as options in the @mentions.   

We cannot disable or delete an LDAP user while they exist in the LDAP and yet after a user is removed from the LDAP directory, Confluence is not updating and there is still no way for us to delete or disable them.   
How can we get them out of the system? I prefer to just disable but delete would be acceptable for several users as we need to clean up the people directory and the @mention suggestions. I've looked at numerous other issues on here and I understand why the "Disable" and "Delete" buttons would be deactivated for users who were added through an outside LDAP. However, we are finding that users who are deleted from that outside LDAP are not being deactivated or deleted from the system. They are still showing up in Administer Users, People Directory and as options in the @mentions.

We cannot disable or delete an LDAP user while they exist in the LDAP and yet after a user is removed from the LDAP directory, Confluence is not updating and there is still no way for us to delete or disable them.   
How can we get them out of the system? I prefer to just disable but delete would be acceptable for several users as we need to clean up the people directory and the @mention suggestions. Right now a user added through Active Directory is permanently in the system and we have no way to remove them.   

Please note that unlike other reported issues, some of these users are members of groups and some of them are not. This seems to have no affect on the limitation. The only users I was able to disable were those who showed Directory = Confluence Internal Directory. We are on 5.2.3.


Answers:
author: Ann Brady
body: When I attempt to disable a user that came in from LDAP I get the error:

The following error(s) occurred:

User "NAME" could not be disabled. The directory may be read-only.


author: rambabu patina
body: Have a look on workaround in <https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFKB/Unable+to+Remove+Users+that+Have+Been+Removed+from+an++LDAP+Group>

Hope this helps you,

Patina

comments: author: LizN
body: I actually had seen that one before. However, of the 15 users I am unable to disable, I would say that half of them are already not members of any group. Instead of reactivating users to remove them from groups, I can just look at the ones who have no group memberships. The only entries in Global permissions are groups so they have no permissions and yet they are still there in the suggested users for @mention and people directory and I have no way to get rid of them.

I don't care if they are part of a group or not, I want to know how to disable their profiles.


author: rambabu patina
body: To disable users in confluence confluence-admin permissions. And you can see the doc to how to [disable or delete the user in confluence](https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Deleting+or+Deactivating+Users).

Thanks,

Patina


author: LizN
body: Yes. I have read those instructions. They say to click on the Disable button which I would absolutely do if it were there. It is not. Should I be posting this under bug reports instead of Support? I read both of these articles prior to posting and stated as much in my original post as well as why they do not apply to my situation.


author: Don Severs
body: I'm in the same position as Liz. Why did Confluence Support stop replying??


author: sb
body: My problem was that my LDAP objectfilter wasn't correct at the initial directory sync. Because of that I had a lot of users in the people directory of confluence who wouldn't ever login. After correcting the LDAP objectfilter all the users were still visible in the people directory. My solutions was to delete those "zombie-users" manually from the postgresql DB-table "cwd_user". I'm pretty sure this is not the supported way and I would ONLY do this for LDAP users who were never logged in to Confluence.Although my problem is solved now, I'm very interested on a official solution for that problem!


Tags: confluence-administration

disable

ldap

people-directory

user