09 August 2024, 4:41

Hi 

We're planning to use the settings as follows to manager user accounts:

• set account life time to 5 years
• suspend accounts where there is inactivity after 13 months

I've been testing these on our 24.04 staging server and things aren't working as I would expect.

1. Accounts have 'expired' - as I assume the accounts were created more than 5 years ago (but I can't seem to find when accounts were created so can't check this is accurate) - but users can still log in.  They don't receive any warning that their account has expired.
2. When I check people's account setting there is no indication of when their account will expire - should the 'account expiry' field be populated once 'account life span' is turned on for everyone (except admins)?
3. I set the inactivity setting to 1 day to see what would happen.  Nothing happened.  No-ones account became 'suspended' due to inactivity.  

I've read the manual but are there some additional requirements for getting these features to work that aren't documented there?

Thanks again for any help you can provide.

Best wishes

Yvonne

09 August 2024, 15:41

Hi Yvonne,

I had encountered some issues with account inactivity myself and had written up some specs for an improvement of it in terms of what I'm expecting if you want to add your thoughts as a comment there.

If you have an account expiry set then that is displayed on the account's setting page in the admin area. When an account has expired, they can no longer log in. If you turn on account expiry but don't update existing accounts, they will not have an expiry date set.

If you want to test things, you'd need to wait for two days and not log in to see if anything happens (or manipulate the database if you have a test site).

Cheers

Kristina

13 August 2024, 1:17

• I set the account expiry and applied it to everyone.  This resulted in 2000+ accounts being listed as expired.
• We're finding that people in that list can still log in even though their account has expired.
• I set the 'inactivity' setting to 1 day and waited. There are no suspended accounts as a result, even though we would expect many to become suspended as it is a 'staging' site that no-one but 'testers' are visiting.

These features are not working as expected, what should we do next?

Yvonne

16 October 2024, 9:02

Hi Yvonne,

Apologies for the long wait. Expiry is generally working in Mahara. So I don't know why it wouldn't for you. So when you go to the administration screen of an account (Admin menu > People search > Search for a person > Click their 'username'), you don't see a date set in the 'Account expires' setting? If you do, did you masquerade as the person or did you properly log in as them? If you masquerade, you can get in, but not when you log in via the regular login process.

As for the inactivity, check that your cron is running as those processes depend on that. You can quickly check on Admin menu > Admin home > Overview. If cron is not running fully, your sysadmin will be able to assist.

Thank you

Kristina