Questions about Invitations for Manually Created Users

Question

We sometimes create external users manually by adding them to a course using their email address. The user will then receive an email invitation containing a link that allows them to create their account and choose their own password.

Until they have completed the registration process, the user cannot be found in the users list for admins. However, they appear in the participant list of the course in which they were created.

What happens if the user never completes the registration? Will the invitation eventually expire or become invalid?

And is it possible to view a list of invitations sent to users who have not yet completed their account creation?

adam_c_voyton · Accepted Answer

There is no built-in report or standard API that provides a global list of users who have been invited but have not yet completed registration. When users are added by email, they usually exist in a pending or unconfirmed state (often marked as “confirmed = false”) and can appear in course participant lists but not in the main admin user directory. Invitation links generally do not expire automatically unless your system has custom settings or plugins that enforce expiration. If a user never completes registration, their account remains in this unconfirmed state indefinitely unless an administrator manually removes or cleans them up.

To identify these users, administrators usually rely on workarounds such as filtering for unconfirmed accounts, checking for users who have never logged in, or running database/API queries. Some systems allow custom reporting through plugins or database queries to surface these records. Without such customizations, there is no centralized view of outstanding invitations. As a result, periodic cleanup or reporting is often needed to manage unused or abandoned invitations.