Deprecating member accounts

Dissociate email addresses from unused member accounts to make the email addresses available for new accounts.

Sections in this article: 

• Considerations and caveats
• How to deprecate member accounts
• Next steps

Considerations and caveats

Who can do this

• Workplace administrators
• Enterprise administrators

What revoking does

As part of this process, you will be revoking one or more member accounts from your digital workplace. Revoking a member does the following:

• Removes the member from your digital workplace (profile information of the account, their contributions, and activity in your digital workplace will persist)
• Removes the member from all groups
• Removes the member's subscriptions

How to deprecate member accounts

1. If the accounts were previously revoked, add them back to your digital workplace.
   • If you need to add only one or two accounts, see Adding a member to your digital workplace.
   • If you need to add multiple accounts, see Bulk Upload.
2. Deprecate the email address associated with the accounts.
   1. Select Control Panel on the Userbar.
   2. Under Membership, select Manage Members.
   3. Enter the member's name in the search box and then press Enter or select Go.
   4. Select Actions next to the member's name, and select Change Email Address.
   5. In the provided field, enter the member's email address with .old (or a term of your choosing) appended to it.
   6. Click Save Changes to apply this change.
   7. Repeat steps 3–6 for each account that you want to deprecate.
3. If your digital workplace uses the customIdentifier field, clear it for the deprecated accounts.
   • You can clear the customIdentifier field for the deprecated accounts by running a Bulk Upload and entering $CLEAR into the customIdentifier column cells. When performing this bulk upload, be sure only to include the email addresses you have deprecated (e.g., Jo.Smith@myemail.old).
4. Revoke the deprecated accounts from your digital workplace.
   1. Select Control Panel on the Userbar.
   2. Under Membership, select Manage Members.
   3. Select Bulk Member Revoke.
   4. In the CSV Data text box, on a new line after email, enter or paste the deprecated email addresses. Each email should be on a new line. 
      • (Optional) In the Title text box, enter a descriptive name.
   5. Select Revoke Members.
      • (Optional) Select Refresh to update the bulk revoke status in the Pending Bulk Member Deletion table.

Next steps

After deprecating these accounts, the previous emails associated with them are no longer tied to any account and can be used again by new member accounts.