Hi,
In a few weeks we will merge two OJS servers with several thousand users registered. We plan to delete all the user registered without any role, but do you find that risky? As far as I can see, users without any role isn’t associated with any journal, so why keep them registered in the OJS system?
Regards
Niels Erik
The only consideration I would suggest would be to check if the users used to have a role in the journal, but that role has since been revoked. For example: the user may be a former reviewer, and that user’s id may still be associated with prior reviews, but is no longer a reviewer for the journal.
@ctgraham I have identified 14,045 unregistered users within our Scholarly Exchange hosted OJS system.
I would like to remove all of these. I have conducted an ‘audit’ style review of these users and identified that many of these user are historic and have not logged within the last year (some are much more historic than that). I also notice that a number of them seem to have rather spammy looking.
I want to ensure that I am not going to cause any issues by removing these users with no role. It has occurred to me that these users could be that these users are related to other Journals also hosted on the Scholarly Exchange server.
I would really appreciate any advise you may be able to offer.
Hi, @Paul_Stevens,
Within OJS, user accounts exist at the site level and are registered for roles within the journal level. A single site, such as Scholarly Exchange, may host many journals. Users enrolled in other journals will appear to you as site users with no role in your journal. Such a user, when they login themselves, will have no interaction with your journal, except for an option to register with your journal (if you have self-registration enabled).
When you try to administer the account of a user who is enrolled in any other journal, you will receive an error message indicating you do not have permission (unless you are journal manager in all of the other journals in which the user in registered).
You could theoretically administer users who are not enrolled in any journal (some spam users might fall into that category), but effectively, they had no access to your journal (or any other journal) in the first place.
Short story: you probably don’t need to worry about these unregistered site users. Do you have any particular concerns I haven’t addressed?
That’s great. I had suspected that this might be the case.
I don’t not have specific concerns, other than the fact that the spammy looking users were potentially using registration for sinister purpose and wanted to ensure that would not have any affect upon our sites reputation on the web. I am currently in the process of registering our journal with a few directories and associations, and want to ensure that we have it in good order, so am currently working through a number of issues, questions and queries we have identified, of which this was one.
I will from herein ignore the unregistered users and simply assume that they relate to the wider host installation.
Many thanks, I most appreciate your detailed response. 