In Kavi® Members, a company or user's status is either 'active' or 'inactive'. User status may be automatically set to 'inactive' if the user's membership expires or the company to which they belong is deactivated. Users and companies can also be manually activated or deactivated by administrators. The most common reason for deactivation is membership expiration. If the membership is renewed, the member can simply be reactivated to restore site access, mailing list subscriptions and other member benefits exercised through the site.

Once a member has been deactivated, they will not be sent automated email notifications concerning membership renewal. An inactive user who tries to get a login link will either see an error message or receive an email explaining that their account is inactive, rather than being sent a new login link.

When a membership expires, Kavi Members deactivates the member rather than deleting the member's record from the database. There are significant benefits to this approach: deactivation makes it easy to restore the member's access if the need arises and keeps all historical information about the member's participation in the organization intact. It also allows graceful recovery when an error occurs. If an individual or company is only deactivated when a membership lapses, it's very easy to reinstate the member. On the other hand, if the system deleted all the member's information, full recovery would be unlikely.

Figure 12.1. Effects of deactivation vs. deletion

Depending on the way the membership type is configured, a member may be deactivated when their membership expires or after a grace period. If the membership type is configured to deactivate the member, the member is only deactivated if they have no other current memberships (in those rare cases where an organization allow members to hold multiple synchronous memberships).

Deactivated members cannot login to protected areas of the site.

When a member permanently cancels their membership or a user requests their information be removed from the organization's database, it may be necessary to delete the member's information in order to comply with your organization's privacy policy. Deleting an company or user is permanent and removes all their information from the database.

One of the responsibilities of Kavi Members is to store member data for use by applications throughout the system, so data maintained by other applications can also be deleted when you delete a user or company from the Kavi Members database.