How to bulk disable users in confluence

[Az]

Hello,

So we have about 500 people in our confluence instance. These users have all at one point or another created/edited some content on a confluence page. However, we are a volunteer organization and users come in an out. At this point, we only have a dozen active users.

We don’t want these past users to have access to our system. I had initially thought of deleting them all, however, confluence doesn’t let you delete users who have contributed. So then I wanted to disable them all, however, I couldn’t find a bulk way to do this. I don’t have the time to go through 500 user accounts and go the disable process manually.

My solution was then to remove all permissions from this confluence-users group and I created a new group ‘current users’ for the active members which had the necessary permissions. But when a new user is created, they are assigned to the confluence-users group by default and can’t do anything.

How can I solve this issue? Ideally, I would like to be able to bulk disable inactive users but I couldn’t find a solution for that. I tried the CLI but that didn’t work.

[AnnWorley]

Your strategy of removing the group that the 500 users are in from the global permissions is a sound one.

You may change the Default Group Membership group by editing the Confluence Admin>User Directory and changing "confluence-users" to "current users":

[Az]

Hi @AnnWorley 

We are only using the confluence internal directory and I don't see an option to make the changes you proposed