Banned 'Tickets'

jack · August 18, 2003, 07:06:36 PM

I dunno wether this has already been done/planned/thrown out but ..

My board has had a bit of trouble with guest users (or maybe just one) spamming the 'Report To Moderator" link, among other things. Unfortunatley, banning by IP is counterproductive if the nuissance is on a dial-up account. We have had to disable guest access for the time being

Here's a kludgey and easily circumvented extra layer of banning...

When a user triggers a ban (either by IP/email/username), they are sent an extra cookie, set to expire in a few hours. The forum should check for this cookie before anything else and deny access if it exists on the client and hasn't been countermanded by the admin.

This means that guests can be banned by IP initially, but the ban stays with their system even if they change IP.

OK, they could delete the cookie, but usually those who find it amusing to do that sort of thing are clueless lusers who couldn't remove a cookie from a jar, never mind their browser. .. it's intended purely as a minor deterrent & to give the admin team a bit of extra breathing space.

I'm probably gonna implement this in Yabbse 154, but is there room for such a beast in SMF do you think?

Wezz6400 · August 19, 2003, 11:52:42 AM

I think that's a pretty good idea. I don't know about the couple of hours though, maybe it should be longer, like a day or so. Or, if a time can be specified for a ban (ie. temporary banning) as long as that is set.

jack · August 19, 2003, 06:47:20 PM

We have it so you have to fill in some text to the box .. and there is a BIG, bright red warning notifying lusers that if they are just wasting time, they will be banned.

Just there was one instance, a few days back, when someone sent 50+ RTMs before one of our admin team turned off guest access to the board... .another problem (that was really trivially fixed) was that the reporter's IP address wasn't in the reporting mail.

It was only after that incident that I thought up the idea. My plan of attack is to actually have 'never expiring' cookies (if that's possible) .. and give a unique one out every time one is generated, and have the board control when it expires.

QuoteI would also like the setting to choose which moderator/admin the report is sent to through the admin, I've got allot of "friendship" moderators that don't really know what they are doing. lol

Although our moderators are moniotred by the admin team - friends are friends, mods are there to do a job, I would like a 'report to admin' & 'report only to mderator' to enable admins to get on with their job & let peeps give confidential complaints about a mod - not that we've had the need for the latter yet

Overseer · August 19, 2003, 06:52:40 PM

^ that 50+ ... search engine crawler?

jack · August 19, 2003, 07:40:53 PM

Quote from: Overseer on August 19, 2003, 06:52:40 PM
^ that 50+ ... search engine crawler?

Nope .. unless they have a profane vocabulary

jack · August 19, 2003, 07:43:47 PM

Quote from: bostasp on August 19, 2003, 06:57:01 PM
Quote from: jack on August 19, 2003, 06:47:20 PM
Although our moderators are moniotred by the admin team - friends are friends, mods are there to do a job, I would like a 'report to admin' & 'report only to mderator' to enable admins to get on with their job & let peeps give confidential complaints about a mod - not that we've had the need for the latter yet

yea i agree, but it might make the bottom of each post look a little cluttered.

Just throwing out ideas .. maybe a 'report message' link at the bottom of a post, and an admin or moderator optionon the 'report' screen. .. that's probably the best way to deal with it... or maybe a board setting where the admins can say they're happy with the mods dealing with complaints themselves in a specific board.

Mecha Dude · August 19, 2003, 09:01:37 PM

How about incorperating what they are doing into a cookie? A simple one would be set a time threashold; every time the person clicks the RTM, it inscreases the count. and each coun has a decay time of th time threashold. Then once they excede it, they won' be abl to click the RTM button anymore. Further require that a cookie be set in order to use that function, and have a overall count saved wich is attached to the RTM message

bananaman · August 20, 2003, 07:13:30 AM

Why not have an admin option to enable/prevent guests from reporting posts - if you only allow forum members to report posts you have a little more ammunition in identifying the culprit!

will · August 20, 2003, 01:09:44 PM

Quote from: bostasp on August 20, 2003, 07:15:10 AM
Quote from: bananaman on August 20, 2003, 07:13:30 AM
Why not have an admin option to enable/prevent guests from reporting posts - if you only allow forum members to report posts you have a little more ammunition in identifying the culprit! 

lol... never thought of that one... good idea

it's normally the simplest solution that makes the most sense and tends to work the best. although i still like the idea of being able to throw a "banned" cookie to a user so they can't just reconnect with a new dynamic IP... i really could have used that a while back.

jack · August 20, 2003, 01:16:59 PM

If I store the details on the server, rather than having a 'self-contained' ticket, it means that an admin can cancel a ticket before it's 'due date'.

Also, I think that guests should have the option of reporting a post - I wouldn't want to have to sign up for a board to sort out a post if someone was slandering me or similar.

[Unknown] · August 20, 2003, 05:13:12 PM

Can I note that you can make it now so that guests can't report to moderator?

-[Unknown]

Jedi~ · August 20, 2003, 06:16:11 PM

Nope, your not allowed to note. NO NOTING!

jack · August 20, 2003, 06:41:53 PM

That's what we do (or did) .. like I said, I want guests to be able to object to something bad without having to register - they can't post though.

At the end of the day, if anything was posted that might damaghe the board (reputation or legal trouble etc.), then I want to make it as easy as poss for peeps to point it out to me. Unfortunatley, there are some idiots out there

[Unknown] · August 20, 2003, 07:13:19 PM

Quote from: Jedi~ on August 20, 2003, 06:16:11 PM
Nope, your not allowed to note. NO NOTING!

Shucks

.

*retreats to his hole, where he is provided scraps and a computer with only SMF

j/k.*

-[Unknown]

Jedi~ · August 22, 2003, 06:33:18 PM

Hehehe

Tom · December 26, 2003, 06:45:41 PM

I know this is an old topic, but I'd like to say this would really help me a lot. IP banning just isn't good enought anymore to keep banned users out. Right now, my email ban list is over 100. My IP ban list is fairly long too. And now that my board is getting well over 20 new members a day, I don't have time to be looking through that many accounts to see if they are suspisious or anything. (But being able to see all accounts with that IP will help me extremly, which is a feature in SMF, I believe.)

With my very limited skilles I did what I could to try and make one, but it is inefficent and you need to manually add in each IP, and it doesn't automatically happen when someone is banned.

If you could consier making this a mod, it would be great and help me out a lot.

Thanks.

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Banned 'Tickets'