suspended users status?

[Right To Know]

hi there FOI folks,

I'm looking for some help I haven't been able to find in the admin manual on suspended users. When a user is suspended, do they still receive notifications and forwarded emails or does correspondence through the platform cease upon their suspension, or does are they simply prevented from creating new requests?

If there's a better place to ask this question (and others I might have) then I thank you for your patience, and please redirect me.

Thank you,

Kat

--

Kat Szuminska

OpenAustralia Foundation

openaustralia | planningalerts | righttoknow | theyvoteforyou | morph

[Gareth Rees]

Hey Kat,

> When a user is suspended, do they still receive notifications and forwarded emails or does correspondence through the platform cease upon their suspension, or does are they simply prevented from creating new requests?

Yeah, this part of the system isn't the best documented [1].

Essentially an account suspension prevents them creating new content (requests, annotations, user to user messages), but still allows them to log in and perform some actions related to their own requests (e.g. download a zip file of a request, which requires log in).

We've had issues with the way this works ourselves [2]. A while back we introduced the concept of a "closed" account, and recently made this a part of the admin UI [3]. Closing an account prevents log in and disables email alerts. This then enables us to temporarily "suspend" (/ban) a user while we investigate, and then easily revoke the suspension or leave it in that state. Or, we can then go on to close the account should we determine the use was bad enough to permanently reject the user from the service.

Hope that helps.

Best,

Gareth

[1] https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/6201
[2] https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/3148

[3] https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/pull/7727