Incredibly after my previous question, the client gave up on the idea and now reverted his request to have an author page ( this one for anyone curious ).

So I wen't to disable the user profile option from "K2 Parameters" --> "Advanced" --> "Enable K2 User Profile".

Even with this option disabled, authors name are still presented as links to their user pages. Am I missing something?

I'm using a Gavick pro template, Joomla 3.41, last K2 Version 2.6.9.

Thank you for any advice!

Do the links produce a 404 error or is the page rendered correctly?

Thank you Krikor again for your time!

Yes, the page is rendering correctly.

There are few things tho that maybe can help:
after the client changed his mind, I've disabled all other users and switched all articles authorship to the Super User.
The site has 2 categories, and each category has its menu link pointing to the respective items listing. Only one has enabled the show author option.
Now when I click on the author (right now is only the Super User) in that category, the items are shown only for that category, even if the Super User has authorship of all articles in the other category too, the url it's also built on that cathegory (.../category-name/authors/123-Super-User).
Maybe that's by design, unfortunately I'm quite a rookie with K2!

Hope I've explained my self clearly enough even if it's quite confusional by the look of it :P

Thank you!

@Uber Gruber

The option for disabling user profiles affects just user profiles. It does not remove user pages. If you want to "hide" user pages you have to disable user links in the component and modules output.

That's what I thought. I've already removed the links from the codes, but as you could guess even if the link is not present on the website, the page is still available.

I've created a simple .htaccess rule to give a 404 to anything looking for the authors like this
Still, this way it's a system 404 apache page, not the template error.php page. Any suggestion on how can I send to the proper 404 page? (not a major issue tho).

Thank you for your time!

By default the page is created and it is viewable.
This cannot be done with a 404 redirect. I would use a 301 redirect to the homepage instead.
Finally make sure that all newly created users match the /authors/ pattern (if you are not using K2's sef or an seo extension)