Symptoms

A user cannot be removed from Confluence administration panel.

Cause

Unusual characters in the name can cause the username to fail to be removed.

Resolution

Provided that the user has never created content, the user can be deleted from the database. Content can range from page, comment, blog posts, space, watches, user info, and so on.

1. Retrieve the user id and user name and find out whether s/he has logged in or not:

   select * from users where name like '%username%';
   
   select * from OS_PROPERTYENTRY where entity_id=<user id from previous query>;
   

2. Presumably if the user hasn't logged in then they wouldn't have created a content, however, to be safe, see if this query returns any rows:

   select * from content where creator like '%username%';
   

3. Check to see if a user info entry (i.e. user profile) exists in the CONTENTtable, then remove it:

   select * from content where username like '%username%';
   
   delete from content where username = 'user name you want to remove';
   

4. Remove the user from the LOCAL_MEMBERS table and USERStable:

   delete from local_members where userid=<user id from the first query>;
   
   delete from users where id = <user id from the first query>;