29 October 2025, 6:11

Hello,

We're looking into removing our institutions from Mahara and wondered if anyone had any insights into this. Specifically: 

• What happens to logins when you suspend the institution - are users automatically directed to the "main" or default site, or are they no longer able to login at all? 
• When an institution is suspended, are the groups and pages within that institution hidden and inaccessible unless migrated beforehand?
• What is the process for deletion? I have seen some discussion that this needs to be done directly on the server, but their doesn't seem to be much official guidance on deleting them entirely.

Appreciate any guidance on this from the community and happy to clarify anything if not clear.

29 October 2025, 14:38

Hi,

The normal process with deleting an institution is to do the following:

1) Remove all people from the institution via the Admin -> Institutions -> Members screen by selecting the institution you want to work with  and then change "People to display:" to 'People who are already institution members' and then remove the people. They end up in the 'No institution' (site institution). 

2) Once the people are removed then you can then delete the institution via the Admin -> Institutions -> Settings screen as it should have a delete button once it has no members anymore.

When an Institution is suspended then the people in that institution are not able to login anymore they get an 'Access denied' message instead.

The pages and groups within the suspended institution are still viewable though.

Cheers

Robert

29 October 2025, 16:52

Hi W G,

In addition to what Robert wrote, there are two ways of deleting accounts: You can do that through the interface from 'Admin menu > People > People search' > Select the people to delete and then 'Edit selected accounts'. If you have a lot of accounts to delete, it might be better to use the CLI script for deleting accounts as you'll less likely run into any timeout and can also define your deletion parameters a bit.

You can also delete groups and thus group content in bulk via a CLI script.

Before you delete personal accounts, decide whether you want to or need to keep an archive of the data, e.g. in case a student asks for it later on or if there is assessment data that has not been archived through submissions. The easiest is also to use the export CLI script. For most flexibility, export in both Leap2A and HTML. The former allows you to import account data back into Mahara.

Please note that you can't export any group data. If you want to keep any group portfolios, copy them first into a personal account and then export that.

Thank you

Kristina