Guest accounts should expire

[fladd]

Currently, guest accounts will not expire, which leads to them cluttering up rooms, even though no one is using these accounts anymore.

Since the whole idea of guest accounts is that of a temporary life-span, this should be reflected in how they are handled server-side.

I propose that guest accounts automatically expire/leave all rooms they are in, if either:

a) The user goes offline

or

b) The account has no activity for 24 hours

[rokups]

I second this. One room i am maintaining has over 500 hundred participants, but in reality its several tens of actual active users. Rest of them are guest accounts. Whats even more funny is that same person coming to chat multiple times picks same alias, but if he does not register then room contains 10 participants with same alias and they will never be coming back.

[gonight]

Is there any known fix or workaround for this yet?

[Bitti09]

Any update or workaround for this ?

[eMPee584]

Is just deleting from users WHERE is_guest == 1 an appropriate shortcut?

[a-fellerer]

This feature would be great!

[KlaasT]

Is there already any update on this or a workaround? In the meantime so many garbage users have accumulated and they are bridged over to IRC. I just don't want to edit the database directly.

[clokep]

The proposed solution sounds reasonable, but the synapse team won't have time to work on this in the near future. We would definitely review a pull request adding some configuration options on handling guest users in the above manner.

[maurerbot]

👍 I'm using a shields.io badge and guests hanging around isn't great.

[rwjack]

https://github.com/Awesome-Technologies/synapse-admin

^ Workaround for the time being, but yeah, another +1 on the purge old guest users feature.
Maybe have an option to create a limit inside which the guest users are rotated, 500 max guest users, when 501 is created, delete 001, etc...

[cjaone]

Just my 2 cents: Daily use of a chat room is very common. I'm not sure: When I join at 8am as a guest, stay for 8 hours and come back the next morning at 8am as a guest will the old account still be visible the whole day if expiration was set to 24 hours after the last actitvity? If yes, then for every guest account who does that there will always be a second "ghost" account in parallel if it was present yesterday. So maybe 12 hours (as a default) should be sufficient, what do you think?