 It is day two of the Domains Workshop, and I am really excited about all the stuff we've been talking about so far. It was very fun to sit in on, watch your troubleshooting session with Amanda earlier. That was really great. Yeah, it was fun. I don't know that I've done that one and actually had a broken site to fix, which was kind of cool. I mean, to be fair, I broke it. Like, I knew what was wrong with it, but it was kind of cool to be able to demo that because the amount of times that we just need to go in and help people disable a plug-in is, I won't say, I said frequently and that's not really true, but it's probably the most common, like, serious WordPress thing that I have to do. Yeah. I would say less than, oh, this happens very frequently. It's when something like this happens, that's frequently the cause. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, now we're going to sort of move over from that to long-term management. So the troubleshooting is sort of short-term in the moment user comes to you with an issue and this is more about planning the future of your project and about growth. So we're going to cover a couple of things. We're going to sort of clarify the process, what that looks like, and then we're going to move into talking about how you may want to decide and set policies on things and then we're even going to talk about more specifically about some of the tools that are available to you. So we can just sort of hop into it. As Taylor is showing right now, we have resources available in our documentation about how to, just what different things you may want to look at, what you may want to consider for account cleanup for that management process. So there's just language around, if you want to be consolidating servers, which we do have some schools doing, as they deprovision, they say, oh, maybe we don't need as many servers as we have currently. Let's merge everything on and that'll be a little smoother. Just a sort of general quick overview of how the process works. I believe we have an article on that, as well as a couple of other things, just useful things to know and sort of sometimes a little bit what a individual user might need to know. But we're also here just to sort of talk about that with you today. Yeah. One thing I really like about this is that it does include sample language. That's drafting emails to end users and you mentioned that, but I think it's a really good, I don't know, I think everyone, I certainly do, but I think most people suffer from the blank email draft, right? So having something to work from is, I think, really valuable. So something that I wish I would have referenced when I was an admin. It totally existed. I just didn't bother to look for it. It's certainly very, we do try and encourage communication throughout the process and we definitely don't want anyone to just sort of be sitting there staring like, what do I say? How do I start this conversation? That's what these resources are for, basically. So just getting into the steps of the process. The first main thing to know is that in terms of the technicals, there's two steps, basically. There's suspension and there's termination. So in the WHMCS session earlier, we talked a little bit about the tools for suspension and termination. And Taylor, if you pull up my account, again, I'm super searchable. We can use me as a little example of what suspension and termination looks like. So in the products and services tab, you'll be taken to one of my, now several accounts because I keep accidentally, accidentally on purpose. I decide to do it and then go, I should have done that, terminating my accounts. So yeah, Taylor is showing you right now the suspend button. And so the suspension, the suspend button suspends an account, exactly what it sounds like. And what that does is it makes a site unavailable. It takes it offline. So the data is still on the server. The site can be restored with the press of a button on suspend. It's still there, but it's not, the user who owns the account can't log into it. And people who are visiting the site on the front end, there is no site. They can't see it. Yeah. So right now, this isn't a perfect example because of course, pilot just made this for test purposes. There's nothing here. But this is an active account, right? This is an active account with sort of nothing in it. If I wanted to, I could log in and drop files. I could install something and populate it. Yeah. And when we hit, you can even see that if we hit the login button here from the WHMCS side. There we go. There's a cPanel account. Right? Yeah. So if we are to suspend my account, Taylor, if you can just go ahead and do that. The reason is for kicks demo, doesn't, yeah. Don't worry about it. It's fine. So then the, and Amanda is pointing out in the chat that suspended accounts do still count them against your domain of one's own limit. That is one of the things that we want to talk about that might maybe take them. Yeah. But so the idea being it's suspended. It's still there. It's still on the server. And as we talked about yesterday in WHMCS and maybe in WHM as well, suspended accounts because they're still on the server still count towards that total number of cPanel accounts on the server, which is what we're looking at. But we're not going to do this quite yet. But the terminate button, the terminate module command, which is also here in WHMCS changes that rather than suspending an account terminating the account takes it off the server entirely. It removes all the data. Users won't be able to log into it because it's just no longer there. Totally gone. And that is harder to walk back. It's not impossible. We keep backups for 30 days after termination just in case. And we're also happy to help you push those backups to a third-party location that's owned by the college. So if that's your AWS bucket, if that's Google Drive, that's Dropbox. We're happy to work with you on that. We definitely have schools that do that. But that's the difference between suspension and termination. I like to point out, too, here. It's not maybe not super important. But I like that they're color-coded in WHMCS. Terminated accounts are red. And suspended accounts are, they look green to me, but I'm weird with green and yellow. I'm also seeing green for what it's worth. So I don't love that color-coding in terms of green. Green seems positive, but it's kind of not. But that is color-coded there. And in WHM, it is color-coded there as well, but it's differently color-coded. Yeah. So if you hop into list accounts in WHM real quick, you'll see we have 140 records. And that's my account right now. We just suspended it. So it's in red. So there's 140 accounts on the server total counting towards that limit of 500 accounts on the server. And this account suspended so it can be marked. But it's still in this list. If it was terminated, it wouldn't be in this list anymore. It would just be gone. And so those are really the two fundamental principles of what deprovisioning is as a process. We're going to go into that and sort of complicate. I say complicate the process a little bit. Talk about steps for managing that process and considerations that you may have starting now. Which is basically what that means is different schools set different policies around when they want to suspend, when they want to terminate, when they want to get rid of an account. And that just comes in different forms, basically. We have schools that say, this is a sandbox project. When you sign up, you get one year to use your C-panel. You get to experiment with it. You get to do whatever you want. You get to learn the tools. And at the end of that year, it goes away. Because you had your chance to play around and to learn. And if you want to take it with you, you can move that day to somewhere else. Migration's super easy. Another thing we're going to talk about in a minute. But we are no longer going to host that account for you because we want to cycle it out to make room for someone else to learn. We also have schools that say, listen, we're happy to keep this for you for while you're studying with us. But once you graduate, that's it. It's going away. We have schools that say, when your email account expires, when you can no longer sign in with single sign-on, that's when it goes away. So there's just lots of different ways to do that. And there's different tools for gathering that data. Some schools just say, hey, if your account hasn't been logged into in eight months, a year, whenever, we have tools for tracking last login. Talk about, I keep saying this. Talk about this in a minute. But if your account hasn't been signed in, you have 30 days to sign in. And at that point, we're declaring this abandoned and we're going to suspend it and get rid of it. So in keeping all that in mind, that's really the first thing is to figure out what criteria do you want or does your team want for your school? Like what criteria can we use to determine what accounts we want to get rid of? That's step one. Figuring that out. And if you need figuring out what help to access, like what data you have access to and all that kind of stuff, we can definitely help you. We're gonna feature some things right off the bat here that you may want to look at. But that is the main thing is, okay, what accounts do we want to retire and what is our criteria for that? Some schools do very of a combination, right? They're looking at like, we're gonna look at this and this and this and then we're gonna email everybody and if we get responses back, we'll let them keep their account. That is probably a lot of manual work at that point. But it is an option too if you wanna be moving in that direction. I'll say when I was in the admin, it was just pretty straightforward. Like if you were a student who graduated, you got your account for a year after you graduated and at which point we were gonna retire it. And if you were a staff member that left the college, pretty much as soon as you leave. So that wasn't, I wasn't retiring accounts all the time but we would do a check-in once a year, make our list and say these people are no longer here. These people graduated more than a year ago and we're gonna mail them, let them know what's happening and then do this a month later basically. Yeah. So once you have those criteria, there's, Taylor says like we set timelines for when people leave the institution, there's defining the last time an account was logged into, is it being used? You can also look at the disk usage. So if an account has two megabytes of data on it, 10 megabytes of data on it and it was last logged into six months ago, you have a pretty good case for a blank account, something like that. And again, there's tools for how to get this information and that whether it's internal, seeing when did someone leave by institution or working with Reclaim to say, hey, how do I get the data for usage stats? And once you have all of that, then it's a good time to start planning your communication and your timeline. So this is again, this is part of why we encourage schools to think about this in advance, to think about the policies that they wanna set before they end up going, oh man, we're almost at our limit. I guess we gotta clean up fast. And so what this looks like is saying, when do you want to have these accounts suspended by? And when do you wanna have these accounts terminated by? How much warning do you wanna give users? What options do you want to give users? And are you willing to say, oh, I guess you're, if you, so for example, we have a school that wanted to give, I think an eight month window, starting five or six months before graduation and saying, hey, when you graduate, you got two months and then your account's going away. We're gonna suspend it the day after you graduate. After that, you have two months to come to us and say, can I please get backups? Can I please take this data away with me? Can I please migrate it to another service? Because CPanel is industry standard, you can pick up your account and take it with you and drop it pretty neatly into an account with pretty much any major hosting provider, anyone who's following that standard, including Reclaim. And we do offer migration options for Domain of One Zone. That's part of our language around those migrations that we have in our documentation. And students basically just need to sign up for an account with us and let us know that they want to migrate their stuff and we just do it. It doesn't cost them anything for the migration. So it's a pretty, about as seamless as possible process if you go with us, but yeah, because it's CPanel, you can go in almost any direction, any CPanel host, the web host that does CPanel, we'll be able to take a backup and in most cases, be able to restore that pretty seamlessly as well. Yeah, exactly. So this school says, all right, we're giving you six months notice and then two months to get in contact with us afterwards if you decide that you do want to migrate and we'll give you your data then. And then they check in six months, four months, two months to graduation. Probably another email around graduation time saying, remember, this is gonna happen. If you want to prep now, prep early, let's do this. We're just periodic reminders. That's a lot of communication. We actually have tools to help you manage that communication in WHMCS. So we showed you that suspended account tool, that termination account tool earlier. Taylor, if you have that up, do you wanna show us? It's called email campaigns. We actually talked about this yesterday in the WHMCS session. We're gonna go a little more into it these days. Yeah, it's under utilities in this version of WHMCS. It's called email campaigns, it's under utilities. In an older version of WHMCS, it's under clients and it's called like mass mail. Yep, mass mail tool. It's otherwise the same for mobile demo. It's just located in a different spot, basically. Yeah, so if you create a new campaign, the campaign name is we're getting rid of your stuff, account cleanup, whatever you wanna call it, Taylor. And the email type is just general. Product, go ahead. Well, and I wanted to kind of mention what these are here too, because they're always super handy for, but there is some kind of nice things in here. So you can go by product or service. General add-on is probably not gonna be super relevant for any of our schools, but domain, I think is also interesting if you are a school that has top-level domains, you can actually email folks based on the status of those top-level domains as well. But product and service can be nice if you want to do, if you want to do something like I wanna email everyone who's got a suspended account, you can totally do that with product and service and say, yep, let's make sure people that have a state U domain that also have a suspended account, we're gonna email them. But probably most often, you're gonna be doing a general email. And then we don't have a client group right now, but a client group is how you can configure the list of people. Yeah, you say everybody who is, for example, in the class of 2023, here's your notice, you're getting these emails, we're putting you in a client group that says class of 2023, and then we're just gonna be emailing you based on your class here. And how does the client groups get set up? So the client groups get set up by us, basically. You can set up a client group in WHMCS, but like managing suspension and termination, that's also something we take care of. You can send us a list of names and emails and we'll go, all right, these names and emails are now in the client group. We would be matching based on emails, so the emails are very important, but this list of people is now in the client group. And then you can just go in and say, all right, class of 2023 client group, we're putting you in here, you are now gonna be the ones receiving these emails. And then you can talk about, in the email, you can talk about timelines, you can talk about the migration options, just based on the language that we already have written in the documentation. If you go for compose message, this is not gonna send anything until we absolutely say send it. I don't know how you found me, that's great. Well, I did, like I said, I use that suspended one so that we can actually send this email to you in this case, so we can kind of see what that looks like, but most often, if you're just doing a client group, that would be the people in the client group. I do really like that it will give you that preview of this is who we're gonna send it to, so. Yeah, and then you would just put in the subject, you'd put in whatever you wanted to send me, getting rid of your stuff. And what this also means, I believe, because on the last section, we also said, like, here's the name of this, I believe this is setting a template that you can later come back to and reuse. Modify if you need to, duplicate, but. Yeah, and you can actually, so we'll get to the compose part here, but there's actually a lot you can do in here, so you can save drafts from within here. You can schedule if you don't wanna send it immediately, which is super handy. And you can also save the message, and this is what would save that template for later. So if you check this box, when you hit either save draft or send campaign, it will save the message, and then you can actually bring up past message that were saved from this list down here, which is really handy for future occurrences. Yeah. Oh, Amanda's saying you can also upload a previously created template at the very bottom. At the very bottom, I assume of load saved message that would be an option. Oh, load message. I'm not sure where this tool is, but one of the other things is that the, I believe the merge fields is you can personalize these. You can say, dear name. We're sending you this because of, because your account name is going to be suspended on this day. Yeah. So I grabbed the first name field. I won't use last name for now. Probably I want to have one that is the company domain. I think company domain is probably correct. This is something we maybe want to document a little better. Yeah, sure. So I'll make a note of that right now, but just the general idea is if you've ever used mail merge, things like that, where they let you create a blank field that auto-populates based on who you're sending it to or auto-populates based on fields in a CSV or something like that that you're using as a resource. This is exactly like that only. You don't need to have a CSV. You can just say, fill in the blank. I know you have this account information somewhere in here, WHMCS. Go find it and bring it back for me. Yeah, I'll put it in Discord. I got to look after this, what field it is that you need for the domain name because I know you can do that, but I'm not seeing that here. It's probably something to do with the way our state UWHMCS is set up, but I'll look for that afterwards and confirm in Discord if anyone wants that information is suspended. So obviously you can draft your whole message here. We're getting rid of your stuff. I forgot that I had loaded that blank template. Yeah, one thing to mention is that there is a distinction between marketing email and not. So if you use WHMCS to send out emails to say everyone with an active account to say like, hey, you can get help with domain of one zone by coming into our office over here in these times or making an appointment or something, they can opt out if you check that box. If you don't check that box, they'll have no option to opt out. Super handy if you want to give people that option. I'm personally of the philosophy of you really got to strike that balance on email otherwise people will just tune out anyway and maybe that battle is already lost, but that's a really great option. Yeah, we also just quickly recommend sending a test email to just you, maybe another person, like if you set up a small client group that's me and two other colleagues and just to check that the merge fields are working, that there's not any typos, just like putting that in can be really useful. And with that, I think we're probably ready to go. You can send that because it's only sending to me. And that's, it's working on it. And just with that, we've covered basically the mail tools that we need. And then the only steps left would be the, the deadlines for suspension and termination. So you would say, all right, people graduate on May 20th. We want to suspend everything on May 31st right away. You tell us that we would set up a option we would set up a note in our schedule to say, all right, run that on May 31st. And that's when we would run those suspensions. We have a script. If you give us a CSV with emails, our current script matches on email, so it will suspend all accounts for users with that email. I think we're working on a script that will match based on username if you want to suspend specific accounts in the event that a user might have multiple accounts. That's not a super common scenario. It is possible. But so we're, that's something that we have in the pipeline. But we have the scripts. You don't have to go through and manually suspend things the way that Taylor manually suspended my account. You don't have to go through and manually suspend everything that would be a nightmare. You don't have to terminate. So bring that information to us and we are happy to take care of it for you. We have covered just about everything except for the ways to gather that data, which Taylor, I know you had a couple of thoughts on and we have a couple more minutes before our next session. So I think we should just get into that real quick. Sure, yeah. We can show that there's a report that we have on our servers called Last Logins that if you ask us for, we can send to you just a upon request. It's generated once a day and stored in the root account of the server. So you can also get it off by logging in to the server as root or using an SFTP client. But for a lot of folks that's maybe not something they want to deal with. So you can also always just ask for it. But this is what it looks like. And let me make this larger here. You may want to make it even just a little bit bigger Taylor if you can. Yeah, for sure. This particular application is strange. Anyway, so, but this is what the actual report looks like. So you've got your Last Login Date, your username, the email address, which I have replaced because I don't want to display everyone's emails on state U, the domain name and the disk usage that they currently have. So you can, because as you see of course you can open it up and sort it, do all kinds of things like that. And that disk usage is measured in megabytes. So earlier when we were talking about accounts that have two, three, 10 megabytes worth of usage, you can sort and say, all right, show me lowest to highest and we're just going to drop everybody who's below 30 megabytes worth of usage. Yeah, the, so that's super handy. Looks like that's running alphabetically instead of by value. Yeah, this particular, I should not have opened it in here. Hold on, let me use like a real actual program that people might use. Okay, so, but of course like, I have this in numbers right now but if you're an Excel person, you can do that, you can do Google Sheets, all of those are fine. But it's super handy to be able to have that disk usage, I think in addition to the last login, right in the same place. Because keeping in mind, this is the last login to the actual C panel, right? So there are totally occasions where someone may log in to their own WordPress directly. And that's not going to be reflected on this report. Similarly, if a user is using SFTP to upload files, I've had, I've worked with users who never wanted, never cared to log in with single sign-on, they just wanted to set up an SFTP account on day one and then use that to upload all of the work that they were doing, writing their own sites, that won't be reflected in last logins. And that's also why it's important to have that suspension period, that period in between suspension and termination, because then if you're going based on last login date, you give an option, a period of time, for a user to come to you and say, hey, why is my site down? I am still using this. And you say, well, you haven't logged in since 2018. And they say, what does that matter? You ignored our last two emails. Yeah, exactly. You haven't been responding to our emails and you haven't logged in in three, four years. And they say, I uploaded stuff last week and that should be just good enough. I wanted to mention too that this report, I think also serves as a really great way to start off with something. So if you wanna send us a list of emails, you can easily start from this report and prune it down to just the accounts you wanna get rid of and send that back. And we can obviously go from there. When I did this, when I was an admin, I got a list of students that had graduated from the previous year from our registrar and I compared that against email addresses in Google Sheets and then used that to make my report. So that was a real easy way for me to do things. Yeah. We are just about at time, if not a little bit over, but I think we've hit everything that I had on my list. Taylor, do you have anything that you want to add? Not really. Well, I will show here, just cause we've got a 15 minute break, I think, between the next two, is that true? Yes, we do. We do have a 15 minute break. So all this in one minute kind of shows something we're working on that I'm excited about. This may take a little bit to actually become available and everything, but one thing that we are working on is a more accessible version of that report that you can just pull up at any time without having to do any SFTP stuff. Yeah, so currently the process for accessing that is to log into the root of the server using SFTP or to ask us to get it for you. Exactly. In which case we would take that step on your behalf. But this... But we're working on this and this is sort of a very rough draft at this point, but we're working on a version of the report that can be actually visible right inside of your WordPress dashboard and it's sortable and you can search it, which is really kind of nice. So you could see the same information but be able to get right to it here and then you can also easily export it as a CSV or perhaps other file types right from this list and get a download of it. You can even of course click right on the account and see it that way, which is actually really nice because right now in WordPress, there isn't really a good way from WordPress to see what their primary domain name is for a particular account. But there are some shortcomings here, like keeping in mind that there are limited things that we can put in this report right now. That's just disk usage and last login date. I think looking way farther out, I'd love to put more information and metrics in here depending on what we can provide and really grow this report out to be something even more useful. For sure. But I think this is kind of step one is we wanna make this really easy to get to and I think this is a good starting place to be able to even at least see the primary domain names for accounts and stuff like that, right from WordPress and all that kind of thing. Yeah, I do wanna very, very quickly add that it's being offered in multiple file types right now. Our scripts that we have for suspension and termination take CSVs. So we know that a lot of people like to work in Excel. So right now we're offering that option to download it as an Excel file. But when you send us the final list, just export it as CSV. Just export it as a CSV. That'll make it a little smoother. Yeah, awesome. I think that's all our steps. And it's important to remember like we listed out a whole bunch of things to consider. You are always welcome to reach out to us in a ticket and to say, I don't know where to start. I want help thinking through the process. So reclaim never wants to define the deprovisioning process for you because each institution is different. They all have different considerations and different needs but we are happy to help consult with you on that process. If you're saying, hey, I think this would be useful but I don't know if it's doable. We can talk to you and talk you through that process and say, oh, other schools have done it this way. What information do you have access to from your institution? How do you wanna go about thinking about this? As we're designing this process. And then once it's designed, you have a policy that you can run year after year and you've done all the work upfront and you don't have to stress about it. Awesome. Well, I think that kinda caps it up for this session. We'll be back in about 10 minutes for kind of a Q&A slash ketchup session. If there's any questions that you have that you want answered, feel free to put them in Discord and we'll also be covering kind of loose ends that have popped up over the last two days. So see you in 10 minutes. See you in 10 minutes. Bye.