Delete or Disable Users

You can delete a user from Confluence if they haven't yet added or edited any content on the site. Content includes pages and blog posts, and edits and comments on existing pages.

If a user has contributed content, you should disable their user account. Disabling a user account won't remove the content they've created.

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See centralized user management.

Someone with a disabled user account can no longer log in to Confluence, and they don't add to your license count.

To delete or disable a user:

  1. Choose  > User management
  2. Search for a user or click Show all users
  3. Select the user
  4. Do either of the following:
    • Choose Delete if the user hasn't contributed any content
    • Choose Disable to deactivate a user account if the user has contributed content

Screenshot: Administering a user

 

Notes

  • The Administer User link is only visible if you are logged in as an administrator.
  • You can also delete or disable users using the Administration Console.
  • You can edit the groups that a user belongs to, to change their permissions without completely preventing their access to Confluence.
  • Multiple user directories – 
    You can define multiple user directories in Confluence, so that Confluence looks in more than one place for its users and groups. For example, you could use the default Confluence internal directory and connect to an LDAP directory server. In that case, you can define the directory order to determine where Confluence looks first when processing users and groups.

    Here is a summary of how the directory order affects the processing:

    • The order of the directories is the order in which they will be searched for users and groups.
    • Changes to users and groups will be made only in the first directory where the application has permission to make changes.
    See Managing Multiple Directories.

  • Number of users and your license – The Confluence 'License Details' screen tells you how many users your Confluence instance is licensed to support, and how many are currently registered. The number of registered users includes only users who have the 'Can Use' global permission. Deactivated users, as described above, aren't included. Choose Refresh to make sure you see the latest count.
  • If the user resides in a Read Only external directory, the option to disable the user won't appear.
  • If a user who has created content is deleted from an external directory, and a new account is created with the same username, that username will be re-associated with the original user's content. This is intentional, to ensure that if a directory sync problem occurs, users are correctly re-associated with their own content.
Last modified on Mar 7, 2019

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