Blog post authorship & account owner transfer

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  rfl8 · Member · Jan 4, 2019 at 4:58 pm

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  Hi

  Our blog is/was to document a three year project that is coming to an end. One of our staff has moved on to another job, but she is still getting notification emails from the blog, such new comment notifications. We want to shut all that off for her. I know from when other admins have left that I can remove the user and nothing happens to all the blog posts they wrote during the project. And that’s good! We want those blog posts to still be attributed to them as author even though they are no longer here.

  So I tried to remove this person, but WP said “sorry, you are not allowed to remove this user.” Next I tried to change the user from admin to contributor, but WP said “sorry you are not allowed to edit this user.” After reading WP community forums a little, I think this is because this admin is the person who started the blog, so I guess she is the account owner–is that right?

  So then is our only option to have her transfer ownership? The problem there is I think it will change the user/author of all the blog posts she wrote–am I correct on that? So in that way it is different from when we’ve removed users in the past and their posts stay up and stay attributed to them as author.

  But is this our only option to remove her from the account? I guess we can then edit all of her 100+ posts to add her byline at the top of the text, but is there a smoother way to do this?

  Thanks and sorry for length.

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  kokkieh · Staff · Jan 7, 2019 at 10:35 am

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  Hi there,

  Transferring ownership to another user should not cause the authorship attribution of that person’s posts to be reassigned to the new owner. It will remove that person as a user from the site, but posts they published should remain attributed to them.

  But before doing that, please see if it doesn’t help if she changes her notification options from her account settings:

  https://wordpress.com/me/notifications/

  As site owner there are likely some things for which she’ll always receive an email, but for most things she should be able to disable notifications there. Note this is an account-level setting, not a site setting, so it will only affect the specific account, but also only someone logged into the account can change that setting.