No way to undo "Permissions Suspended"?

Server administration Troubleshooting
#1

It seems that a user created an account in our instance but never confirmed email address. Then, somehow that account was automatically suspended (?). Now, that user wants to activate that account indeed, but the account is in a strange situation:

  • After clicking “Undo suspension” the account shows “Login Enabled” but still “Permissions Suspended”.
  • No email is shown, neither found when searching for email addresses in the instance, but the user cannot create a new account with that email, neither retrieve a new password.

So it looks like the current username and email address are “taken”, and the account cannot be enabled again because the alleged password isn’t working anymore, and due to a lack of an email address a new password cannot be retrieved.

As a moderator/admin, I don’t see how can I totally enabled this account and/or how to assign an email address to it. Am I missing something? If not, is there something relatively clean that can be done via command line?

The account was never enabled, never followed anyone or was followed, never posted anything. The user didn’t even log in successfully ever as far as I can tell.

I am reporting this not only to make this user happy, also because it looks like something leaving account sin a limbo that shouldn’t be happening in general.

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#2

Accounts that aren’t confirmed by users in ~2 days are deleted to free up their username to be used by other people. If they’re suspended manually before this takes place (for example, by an admin), they won’t be affected by this sweeper and the account will remain “locked” (to prevent anyone else from signing up with it). I’m also not sure how you know that they never confirmed their email address—it’s possible they did confirm it and were banned, but are telling you they didn’t confirm it to get you to let them back in. All records of a user are wiped when they’re suspended, so “last logged in at” will always show that the user has never logged in.

You can see records of admin actions at /admin/action_logs.

If you want to delete an account to clear up its username, you can run Account.find(id).destroy in the rails console. Note that this will NOT delete the account on remote servers, so it is NOT safe to use this on any accounts with remote content. Since you said the user never signed in and never confirmed their email address, i would assume it’s safe to use it on this user.

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