If a user has, for example, violated your Community Policy, you may wish to remove their access without deleting them, to ensure that they are not able to re-register with the same email address.
This article contains the following sections:
Create a Blocked Users group
Head to the Groups settings page and select 'New Group'.
Name the group 'Blocked Users' and hit save. This group should have no abilities in order to restrict users to the fullest extent possible.
Then, head to the Users page and search for the user you want to block. You need to ensure that the user has been removed from all other groups that they are a member of.
Once they have been removed from all other groups, head back to the Blocked Users group and add them to it.
Using this method, the user will still be able to login to your site but they will be restricted from performing any actions.
Account Deactivation
An alternative to the 'Blocked Users' group method is deactivation of a user's account. This will ensure that the user can no longer login to your site, however their profile, content and conversations will remain on the site and still be accessible.
This can only be actioned by Zapnito so if you would like to deactivate a user's account on your site, get in touch with us at support@zapnito.com.
Comments
6 comments
Alex, can the profile of a blocked user still be found by other users?
Hi Jodi - the profile of a blocked user would not be discoverable by other users on the site due to them not having the 'Allow profile' ability, meaning that the profile is completely hidden.
The only way another user would be able to discover the blocked profile is if they had the admin ability, 'Access hidden profile'.
Let me know if you have any questions?
Hi Alex, actually I logged out (so made sure I was just a regular user w/o any admin privileges). I did a search for one of the spam profiles that we have been receiving lately and the profile was accessible to me). Is that because I did a direct search for them?
Hi Jodi - I've investigated this further and found that the reason the profiles are discoverable is due to them still having their profile visibility settings set to 'true'. You can see this yourself if you temporarily enable the 'visibility enabled' toggle in your registration settings, sign in as one of the blocked users and visit the Edit Profile page.
If you disable this toggle for each of the users they will no longer be discoverable on the site. Apologies for the additional effort involved with this, unfortunately removing the 'Allow profile' ability does not automatically override this setting; as an outcome of this what we are going to do is discuss internally whether this is something that should happen automatically and if so, we will updated the platform accordingly.
Thank you for your understanding.
Thanks Alex! One more question on this:
I blocked (added to blocked users group) a user, Vishal Malhotra, yesterday afternoon and removed him from the user group. Unlike deleting a user which takes 24 hours, blocking them is immediate. At 1:59 am I was notified he had published this post Where can I buy top of the line package testing instruments? | AVIXA Xchange. I'd been logging in as the user and unpublishing their content before blocking - I must have missed removing his previous content so I'll go in later, activate him for a minute so that I can delete his posts, and then re-block him, but how was this able to happen? If I log in as him, I don't have access to post, so how is this possible? I know this "company" has multiple users, but this was from a blocked profile.
Hi Jodi - it wouldn't be possible for a blocked user to publish a piece of content. I've taken a look at this user's GS session history and it appears that they created the post several hours before they were added to the blocked user group on the 26th June (please ignore the recent session history as that was me signed in as them).
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