When someone will no longer be participating in your church, you want to keep their history around but you don’t want their profile showing up all over Planning Center anymore. That’s why we provide an option to set a profile’s status as inactive, so that you can keep your active members list tidy without having to delete data.
However, setting a profile inactive can trigger a myriad of destructive side effects that are essentially impossible to undo. An inactive profile is removed from any teams and future plans in Services, their registrations for upcoming events are cancelled, they’re removed from any group in Groups, and any permissions they have in any app are revoked. It’s kind of a bummer to accidentally set someone inactive who shouldn’t be.
After one too many Planning Center users had a really bad day (they mistakingly misused an automation that set everyone on a list to inactive), we’ve decided to remove that action as an automation. We don’t want to do something so destructive without an admin looking at the data and confirming that inactivating these profiles is in fact the right thing to do.
From today forward, you will still be able to set profiles inactive as a one time bulk action anywhere that bulk actions are available in People, but you’ll no longer be able to use that action as an Automation. (Existing automations will continue to work, but you may want to reconsider using them!)
Here’s to safer automations and happier admins!