I have a user that accidentally signed up to our mattermost twice. I went into the database and deleted the user but his ghost seems to live on – he still shows in the user list and such. How do I go about removing all traces of the old (deleted) user?
Hi @RangerRick, please see documentation on deactivating user.
Aha! Well I guess it’s too late for that, because I’m an idiot that didn’t back up the DB first. 
All of my googling did not come up on that page, I guess maybe because I was searching for “delete user” rather than just deactivate, and the closest thing that page has is “deleted” past-tense, I dunno.
I guess at this point I’m kind of screwed? Where is the old user in the user list even coming from? Must be from something hashed in the database? Because even if I pg_dumpall and grep for his old userid or username, I get no hits after cleaning out things referencing him.
Sorry, it’s our fault in two ways:
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We should really have a feature that removes a user from the system by converting the username and email to a restricted name space, then archiving the user. It’d be the same as delete, except that integrity would be preserved.
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We should have more clear documentation that the system doesn’t support manual manipulation of the database. We had this in our trouble shooting guide, but it’s really too late when you get there, I’m moving it now to our Admin Guide.
We need to upgrade our admin guide so it that walks people through how to run everything as designed.
Really sorry about this, not sure how you deleted the user, maybe it’ll continue working… What’s the approximate number of users on the system right now?