Remove an admin's access to account; keep his blog posts and byline
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Hi,
We had an employee contributing blog posts to our WordPress.com blog for a year. He had Admin access. He no longer works here.
For our account security, I don’t want him to be able to log in anymore. But we are definitely keeping his blog posts up and we want his byline (author attribution) kept on them as well.
Is this possible?
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Hi,
I think that the best solution would be to change the user privileges to the Contributor role. Here is a quote from the User Roles support doc:
A Contributor can create and edit only their own posts, but cannot publish them. When one of their posts is ready to be published, or has been revised, the Administrator needs to be notified personally by the Contributor to review it. Furthermore, once a Contributor’s post is approved and published by an Administrator, it can no longer be edited by the Contributor.
Contributors do not have the ability to upload files or images, but they can see your site’s stats.
So the Contributor role won’t keep them from logging in as a user on the site, but it highly limits their ability to make any changes. This user would have no ability to edit any of the already published posts.
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Hi sstabrizi, thanks. I think that’s what I have to do. Seems odd that I don’t have the option for that extra level of security. I wonder if that’s because we are using the free version?
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No, it’s not anything that would change from the free version to one of the upgraded plans. The roles are the same either way.
If the main goal is that you do not want them logging in at all, another suggestion I could offer would be for you to change the email and password associated with that user. That way the user would no longer be able to log in or recover the password, but the info associated with that user account would remain.
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I would like to do something like that, but I don’t see a way to change any details of his account. I’m clicked into that “team member” as WP calls it, but it seems like my only options are to change his role as you suggested, or reattribute all his blog posts to another user.
I guess I could create a dummy account with his name on it. But then what am I going to do for sending an invite to the dummy account, set up a fake email account for it?
Seems so odd that I can’t just lock out a former staff member. Maybe WP is not ideally suited for business use… Thanks for all your help.
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Another suggestion I could offer would be for you to change the email and password associated with that user.
You’re right, I just realized this suggestion won’t work on a WordPress.com site. It only applies to WordPress.org self-hosted sites. Short of creating a dummy account and dummy email, I don’t see any other options that will work.
Best of luck!
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@rachellintz you may be able to change their role to a site viewer — would that work for you?
As another option, you may be able to create another user with the same display name, then reattribute their posts. I’d think the first option may be better though. Let us know your thoughts.
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Hi supernovia, thanks. The only options to change him to are Administrator, Editor, Author, and Contributor. No Site Viewer. :(
I might do the latter but to set up the “fake” account I need to send an invite to an email address, right? So then I need to first create a fake email address for my fake employee? Ugh seems like a lot of work.
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@rachellintz Mmm, yeah it might not let you set that when they own articles.
Would you want to just edit the articles and add a byline that way?
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WordPress used to have a feature to do exactly this — remove a user’s ability to log in and create new content, while still retaining all of that user’s posted content, with attribution to the original author’s account. It’s silly that WP doesn’t allow this any more, since this is a common issue for many organizations with lots of content authors that change over time.
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