User identity contains a string of random letters and numbers
Who is this article for?Administrators who are responsible for User management.
Admin permissions are required.
Whenever a User is created, they are assigned a unique identity value. This article explains why some identities appear as long strings of alphanumerical characters
1. Unique IDs
If you have a long standing implementation of the system, you might find that some Users have Unique IDs comprised of a large group of random numbers and letters, for example: 475da948e4ba42d9b5bc31ab4b8006113fd5f538.
These identities are x509 certificate thumbprints, and were used in v3 and earlier to identify Users that were not able to use Windows authentication.
Authentication via x509 certificate was replaced with Forms-Based Authentication (FBA) in v4, and has not been supported since then.
These identities are no longer used, and it is safe to mark them not Active.