Forum Discussion

AustinK's avatar
AustinK
Qrew Commander
4 years ago

Placeholder Users

In our main app we have around 4,000 placeholder users in addition to our regular and denied users. ~8 of them have actual names of real users. Most of them are simply a random number like this:  ""-527502726"". 

I had contacted support and they were unable to tell me much about placeholders other than they are possibly imports that have gone bad in some way. They told me it is impossible to know where they are coming from or what created them as they do not have any kind of tracking in the system for this. That was a little surprising to hear.

Their suggestion was to just remove the placeholders. We eventually did this. Thursday of last week I removed them with the big "Remove Placeholders" button on the manage users tab next to Home and everything was good. I came in today and all 4k placeholder users are back in the user list. I have reached out to support again but because of the fact that they could tell me nothing about them previously I am hoping someone in the community has dealt with this in the past and may know what could be creating these or even bringing them back all at once. I know you may not be able to tell me exactly where to look but even a hint at what could be the cause may help us track it down.

What we have done so far is we have looked through every single user field in the app and were able to find one field that contained 4 or 5 of these users in them, but only the named ones not the random numbers. Past that no user field in the app contains any of the other 4,000+ users. We leveraged the App Library to create reports of all user fields to check this.

We have checked our automated imports and as far as we can tell nothing is wrong with them. We use the email associated with the Quickbase account to import users when needed.

Any help is very much appreciated on this. I am at the end of my rope here and don't know what else to check.
  • Are you able to narrow down if your import is adding them back in? If so, is it possible somehow in the import it is adding some random character to your email addresses, or something strange like that, so it's not recognizing them as users and creating placeholders?

    Perhaps you can delete them (not sure how long that process takes), then immediately do an import, just to at least see if it is coming from the import.

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    Mike Tamoush
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    • AustinK's avatar
      AustinK
      Qrew Commander
      No because no user fields contain the data that I can find. Support said a user field would contain all of these in the number form if they were in the list but it is not the case. It is just kind of out there with no attachment to anything as far as I can tell. They said it was most likely and import but they don't know for sure.

      Something new I noticed today. When using the method I mentioned where we search each field for these numbers it is clear they are actual users. When I do a search for one of the -45435345 numbers where it creates a temporary report it converts that number into a user in the report name. Instead of the report title being "Last Modified By is -45435345" it says "Last Modified By is Doe, John" for example and every record they last modified. So Quickbase knows what these numbers mean and what users they are attached to, it's a really strange issue.