"must reactivate user first" message pops up with no explaination

Question

I'm trying to invite a guest to a business class trello board. I message pops up saying "must reactivate user first" with no other explanation or link. What does this actually mean? There is no documentation about this, and poorly/loosly formatted searches lead to this page,

https://help.trello.com/article/1029-what-is-a-deactivated-user

which is talking about reactivating a member of a workspace, which is a completely different situation, as far as I can tell. The user in question has never been a member of the workspace in question, nor should they be.

Thomas Murphy_y4q99y · Answer

So it turned out that the users I was trying to invite were all from another organisation (a customer) which has an "organisational admin" for Trello, so individual users with that @somedomain.com address are blocked by default and have to be manually activated by the Trello admin at the organisation. This error message is precisely no help in working this out, though, I needed a Trello support ticket and 2 days before I knew what was going on.

Thomas Murphy_y4q99y · Answer

@Iain Dooleymaybe, but I have no way of knowing if this is true because it's occurring when I'm trying to invite various clients, so I have no way of establishing the status of their Trello accounts, and shouldn't have to trouble them to find out.

What I would like to know is whether this functionality and the associated message is actually documented anywhere? From there I could eliminate possibilities methodically.

Iain Dooley · Answer

@Thomas Murphy this sounds like the same error I saw recently after I deleted a Trello account, but that member was still a member of a board, but as like a "ghost" member. When I tried to copy the board with members, I got the same error. I think it means the person you're inviting had an Atlassian account and deleted it, and it now needs to be reactivated.