Enable or Disable an Actor

Overview

Enable or disable an actor to pause or resume a publishing identity without losing its setup. This lets you stop federation safely during maintenance, policy changes, or staffing changes and resume later when needed.

This is useful when a publishing identity is being retired temporarily, when you want to stop a bot or organizational feed, or when you need to pause federation without losing the actor configuration. After you complete the change, the actor remains in the Actors list but follows the new active state.

Before you begin

Actor records must already exist in Components -> Fediverse -> Actors.
You need permission to edit actor state.
Decide whether you are pausing federation temporarily or reactivating an existing actor.

Steps

Open Components -> Fediverse -> Actors.
Select one or more actors.
Choose the toolbar action that matches the intended state.
- Enable - Allows the selected actor to resume normal publishing and outbound delivery behavior.
- Disable - Prevents the selected actor from producing new federation activity without deleting the actor record.
Wait for Joomla to apply the action.
Confirm the Enabled column in the list shows the new state.

Check your result

Disabled actors stop producing new outbound deliveries.
Re-enabled actors can publish and deliver again.
The actor records remain available for editing and later reuse.

Troubleshooting

The state does not change in the list

Likely cause: The wrong rows were selected or the page is still showing old list state.
Solution: Refresh the list, select the intended actors again, and repeat the toolbar action.

A disabled actor still seems active

Likely cause: Existing deliveries were already queued before the actor was disabled.
Solution: Review recent delivery timestamps and queue entries to confirm whether the activity was created before the disable action.

Publishing fails after re-enabling an actor

Likely cause: The actor state changed successfully, but another dependency such as the delivery worker or article author mapping is still wrong.
Solution: Confirm the actor is enabled in the list, then verify scheduler tasks and publishing configuration separately.