Best Way to Suspend/Hide Members w/o Deleting Them?

[John T Davis]

Hello, all,

Our forum is a paid member benefit for our professional organization. Occassionally, members' paid accounts will lapse for one reason or another. We're not using any sort of single sign on (SSO) at the moment, and unlikely to implement that anytime soon.

I would like to do the following when a paid account lapses:

1. Remove the Member's Ability to Access Any Part of IPS. Even logged in, I don't want them to be able to see anything.
2. Retain the IPS Account. It's possible that a lapsed member will become active again, so I would like to preserve a suspended account so it can potentially be reactivated later.
3. Allow Members to Continue to View Posts from Suspended Members. Ideally, removing a member's read/write access to IPS would leave their existing posts in place so as to preserve conversations that have already happened.

Is there any way to do this with the core IPS software? With a plugin/app?

Thanks!

[Nathan Explosion]

1) Create a new group that has no access to anything....move the users in to it.

2 & 3 take care of themselves.....the account isn't deleted unless you delete it, and the status of an account has no effect on the ability for others to see their posts unless you do something with the posts yourself (delete them, move them, hide them, whatever)

[John T Davis]

3 minutes ago, Nathan Explosion said:

1) Create a new group that has no access to anything....move the users in to it.

2 & 3 take care of themselves.....the account isn't deleted unless you delete it, and the status of an account has effect on the ability for others to see their posts unless you do something with the posts yourself (delete them, move them, hide them, whatever)

Thanks, @Nathan Explosion.

I almost tried this, but I wanted to make sure it was the right approach before I did it. I'm so happy it turned out to actually be this easy.

[Linguica]

I have a "Deceased" usergroup (my forum is very long lived) that does basically the same thing - preserve the account as it is, but in a usergroup that has no permissions to do anything.

[FabioPaz]

I think this was classic: you create a member group called "Banned" with grey color and remove every right this group have. Done.

[John T Davis]

Got it working. Thanks!