What happens to a member's Discourse account when you delete them

When you delete a member in Ghost, their forum account doesn't disappear on its own. You choose what happens to it under When a member is deleted in Ghost, in the form behind Edit settings on the Discourse tab.

The four choices

Whatever you choose, someone you've deleted in Ghost can't sign in to the forum through your site any more, because they're no longer a member.

If someone asks you to erase their data, anonymizing or deleting covers the forum too. Suspending keeps their name and email in Discourse.

When it happens

We notice a deleted member within a few minutes and apply the choice that's set at that moment. Changing it later doesn't touch accounts we've already handled.

It covers forum accounts of members who've signed in through your site. We leave alone any forum account that was never used with your site's sign-in.

Discourse doesn't let us suspend, anonymize or delete its admins and moderators, so their accounts stay as they are.

Many deletions at once

If a lot of members go missing at once, we leave their forum accounts alone. That's more than five members and more than a tenth of everyone who has signed in to the forum through your site, or all of them at once.

A drop that big is more often a problem reading your site's data than a real clean-up, and a deleted forum account can't come back.

The Discourse tab then says your forum needs attention. Members can still sign in, but group, name and email updates pause for everyone until we've looked at it. Testing the connection won't clear it.

Email help@magicpages.co and tell us whether you meant to delete those members. If you did, we apply your choice to their forum accounts. If you didn't, we leave the accounts alone and clear the warning. Either way, updates start again.