Open an account's moderation page from Control Panel > Users. To ban someone, suspend them: it stops them and hides what they posted, and you can undo it.
| Action | Who can use it | On this server | On other servers | Can be undone? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Silence | Moderators | They can still sign in and post, but their posts stay out of public timelines for anyone who doesn't follow them. | Not told. | Yes |
| Freeze (local accounts) | Moderators | They're signed out and can't sign in or use apps. Their profile and posts stay visible. | Not told, and their posts stay visible. | Yes |
| Suspend, local account | Moderators | They can't sign in. Their profile and posts are hidden. People here connected to them are notified. Follows are kept. | Told to remove the account, and no longer served its profile or posts. | Here, yes. Other servers may not restore it. |
| Suspend, remote account | Moderators | Their profile and posts are hidden, and whatever their server sends on their behalf is ignored. | Not told. The account keeps working on its own server. | Yes |
| Delete all posts, local account | Administrators | All their posts, reposts and scheduled posts are deleted. The account and its files stay. | Asked to delete each post. | No |
| Delete all posts, remote account | Administrators | This server's copies are deleted. They can reappear if they're fetched again or the account keeps posting, unless it's also suspended. | Not told. | No |
| Suspend and delete posts | Administrators | Both of the above, in the right order. | As above. | The suspension, yes. The deletion, no. |
| Delete account, local account | Administrators | The account and its posts, files and follows are deleted. Its username can't be used again. | Told to remove the account. | No |
| Delete account, remote account | Administrators | This server's copy, its posts and files are deleted, and the account can't return here. | Not told. The account stays on its own server. | No |
Root, system and moderator accounts can't be deleted or have their posts deleted in bulk. To delete a moderator, remove their role first.
Deleted accounts leave the list on Control Panel > Users. Choose Deleted under State to find them, for example to restart a deletion that stalled.
Scheduled posts don't go out while an account is frozen or suspended. A post that falls due in that time is dropped, and isn't sent when you undo the action. A scheduled blog post goes back to being an unscheduled draft instead.
Acting on several accounts at once
On Control Panel > Users, tick the accounts and choose from Actions. Your selection stays while you change the search and filters, up to 100 accounts at a time. Every action does what it does for a single account, with the same log entries and notifications, and who can use it is the same as in the table above.
- Who is left out. Root, system and moderator accounts are refused for everything except undoing. Deleted accounts, accounts already in that state, and remote accounts for Freeze are skipped. These are listed in the results.
- Confirming. The confirmation counts the local and remote accounts affected and says what happens to each. You also type that number to delete posts or accounts, or to suspend local accounts, since other servers may not restore those.
- Results. The Mass actions tab lists each account as succeeded, failed or skipped, for 7 days. The moderation log keeps its own entries as usual. Started means a local account's suspension or unsuspension took effect here and the messages to other servers are queued, with no single result to report. One account failing doesn't stop the others.
- Stopping. Stop remaining skips accounts not started yet, and lifts the freeze or suspension on any account that was only held while waiting to have its posts deleted. Once an account's posts have started going, that account finishes.
The limit is 100 because one local suspension sends a message to every server yours knows about, so at 5,000 servers a batch is 500,000 deliveries, over an hour at the default rate.
A mass action runs one account at a time on its own moderation queue, so other background work carries on. It waits while more than 10,000 deliveries are queued, and holds account deletions while 3 or more jobs are waiting on the db queue, where they run. Single Delete all posts requests use the moderation queue too. An account with many posts can still take a long time, and it holds up the accounts behind it in the batch.
Other servers are asked, not made to
Everything sent to another server is a request. Software that honours it removes the content; software that doesn't, or a server that was unreachable, keeps its copy. Mastodon doesn't act on the message sent when a suspension is undone, so an account it removed stays removed there.
Why order matters when deleting posts
A suspended account can no longer be looked up by other servers, so a server that doesn't already hold its key can't verify a deletion sent in its name. If you want a local account's posts gone from other servers as well, delete them before suspending it. Suspend and delete posts does this for you: it freezes the account straight away so it can't keep posting, deletes the posts, then suspends it and lifts the freeze. The Suspend switch turns on when that finishes.
Deleting sends one activity per post to the account's followers' servers, to anyone mentioned, and to relays, so a large account keeps the delivery queue busy for a while.
Email addresses of deleted accounts
Normally, once a deletion finishes, the address can sign up again, with a different username. To stop that, turn on Block this email address from signing up again in the delete dialog. Use it for spam or abuse, not when someone asked to be deleted and may come back.
- Only a hash of the address is kept, so a list of blocked addresses can't be shown. To check or lift a block, use Control Panel > Registration > Blocked email addresses and type the address.
- Upper and lower case and a
+tagare ignored, so blockingbot+1@example.comalso blocksbot@example.com. - The block covers sign-up, single sign-on and changing an account's address. If your server doesn't require an email to sign up, someone can still sign up without one.