You may notice a lot of users in your users lists and metrics that you don't recognize. Typically these users come in from open-source libraries they contributed to at some point in the past. Since Flow tracks the origin user of each line of code and looks at all historical data, adding a third-party library imports those users too. They generally don’t appear in your reports since they’re not members of teams and are mostly involved in historical data. These users can safely be excluded or hidden from Flow.
However, there may be times when you want to exclude users with recent contributions who may be part of your organization. Use this article to decide whether to hide or exclude users and how to determine what your best option is.
Note: Users who are not part of your organization and who were imported with an open source repo do not have access to your instance or data. Users must be assigned a login before having access to Flow. Hiding users does not delete them.
Should I exclude or hide users?
Exclude or hide users based on the type of user and the information you want to see about them.
Tip: Be especially cautious about hiding any active contributors who have had PR or commit activity in the past 30 days. These users are more likely to be providing legitimate and valuable data for your metrics. Use the Active contributors quick filter on the Users page to identify active contributors.
| Which users? | What happens? | |
|---|---|---|
| Exclude |
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| Hide |
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Note: Wondering what to do with users who have left your organization recently? In most cases, we recommend neither hiding nor excluding them. Doing so would dramatically affect your recent metrics by removing legitimate data and, in some cases, affect the metrics of users who are still part of your organization, particularly for collaboration metrics.
Instead of hiding or excluding these users, disable their Flow access if they had access, and make no other changes to them. This will ensure your historical metrics remain consistent and the users leaving your organization no longer have Flow access.
When to exclude users
Exclude users from your reports so you only see your team. Learn more about the data associated with these non-organization users in the API Guide: how to locate unknown users in your data.
Excluding users removes those users’ metrics from metrics and reports. Users who don’t contribute code or PR activity often may skew the team’s metrics. Excluding those users allows you to capture more accurate metrics for the team.
For example, you may have engineering managers, directors, or scrum masters assigned to your team to access the team’s metrics. You may also have QA engineers commenting on tickets and PRs, but not contributing much code or being assigned tickets you want to track. Excluding them from metrics will prevent them from distorting the metrics for the team.
Learn more about excluding users from reports.
When to hide users
Users who are not part of your organization or who left your organization more than 12 months ago may be imported when you import an open-source repo. The Hidden users feature allows leaders to hide these users. Hiding users removes them from user lists and excludes those users’ data from the metrics. This keeps your focus on the users who are part of your organization.
Once a user is hidden, they are hidden from the User list, removed from all teams, have a badge on their user detail page, and have their data excluded from metrics. You can hide and unhide users from their User detail page.
Note: Hiding users excludes those users from the historical metrics. We encourage caution when hiding users. If you may want to include the users' metrics later, excluding users is preferred.
Learn more about hidden users.