Request

[adraqdemic]

Hello all.
I want to know if it's possible for someone to create an automated search script, visible only in the Admin Panel.
And, that script to contain a box, to insert a lot of words, or other thing, for the script to search on the entire forum, and the words that doesn't find them in the forum, to save them in a .txt file, somewhere on the hosting machine.
Is it possible to create something like that?
I really need it. And i am not familiar at all with php.

[Arantor]

Um, why exactly? What exactly would you achieve by searching the forum for a series of words and producing a list of the ones that weren't found?

[adraqdemic]

I have a gaming forum.
And i want to check all my admins, if they posted every ip that they banned on the forum.
And i have a list with 7000+ banned ip's. To check it one by one, will take me a month.
That's why i need a script like that. To enter the list in the script, and to search automatically. What it doesn't find posted, save it in a txt file.

[Arantor]

Wait, banned IPs?

What would you do with this text file, exactly?

* Arantor doesn't really understand the problem you have.

[adraqdemic]

Mate, i have a gaming forum, with a Counter-Strike server. And, i want to check if my admins, posted every banned people from the server, on the forum.
The IP's that are not posted on the forum, i want to remove them from the ban list, on the CS Server.
That's why i need a script like this.
If an IP address is banned, and not posted on the forum, i want to remove it from the server.

[Arantor]

So, let me get this straight, you have a list of 7000+ IP addresses.

You want your admins to post when they've banned an IP address.

And then you want to check what the admins have banned, against this list to see which ones have been missed, so you can ban the rest in the CS server.

That seems rather circuitous.

See, the way I'd approach it would be to get a list of what's already banned in the CS server (that must be possible, surely), put both lists into an Excel spreadsheet and then get Excel to check which ones are duplicated in the two lists. Doing anything else seems horrifically complicated, fragile and likely to go wrong in a variety of interesting ways.

[adraqdemic]

The admins, already posting every ban that they execute on the server.
But, some of them, ban peoples, for no reason, and don't post the ban on the forum
And i wanted to get the list with banned ip's from the server, and do a search on the forum. And every ip that it's not posted on the forum, from that list, to be saved on other .txt file. And in this way, i know what ip's are not posted on the forum, and to remove them

[Arantor]

Ah, now we have an explanation, fantastic. I can see your logic. I'm still not convinced I agree with it.

Why would an admin ban someone and not post it? Was it an oversight or was it intentional?

Here's the other thing... under the proposal, you'd be searching the entire list over and over and over. Why not take it as read that current bans are as-is and then only look at new bans?

Searching is a horribly complex process, and depending on your forum setup it may not even work properly anyway for what you want.

[adraqdemic]

Because some of them feel like gods on the server, and making what they want.
And in this way, i will find the one who banned someone, and didn't posted it, with a reason and a proof for that ban.
And searching one-by-one, will take me a lot of time. Time that i don't have to spare.

[Arantor]

And therein lies the other problem, neither does your forum server. Doing a search on that magnitude, even only once a day, is a phenomenal load on the server.

[dimspace]

If you have mods that are banning people for no reason, why are they mods?

On a side note, I think its optimistic to hope that this will be a feature of SMF 2.1, or even SMF 20.1 come to that :S

[mashby]

I imagine this topic will be moved somewhere else.

adraqdemic, I think it's imperative to define WHAT you want up front. You started off with HOW or the proposed solution.

Putting IP addresses in a post/topic seems rather repetitive and redundant to me. If your problem is mods banning folks and not letting you know, remove their ability to ban IPs.

[Kindred]

This is yet another example of a feature which is useful to one or two sites and yet they seem to think that it should be a feature for SMF in general. That makes no sense at all.   While there are some features in SMF which re barely used, the majority of them... And most new features... Are thins which are not bloated resource wasters and are things whic the majority of sites could use.

As already indicated... If your mods or admins are acting badly or abusing powers, then remove them. Plain and simple.

Finally... This is something that actually would be faster to do in an excel spreadsheet or a sort/compare program like ultra edit and ultra compare

[dimspace]

Im still confused as to what he wants to do:

Am i right in thinking, theres a games server, and a forum on the same server.

People are being banned on ip on the games server (which is fairly normal), but the forum is sharing the same ban list so people are being banned from the forum as well?

And he wants to remove those people from the forum ban list? Or am i wrong.

Whatever, its not feasable for a feature.

[Arantor]

No, he's got a game server and a forum server. They might be the same, they might not, doesn't really matter.

As admins ban from the game, they also post it on the forum. He wants to find the cases where people are banned on the server but no matching post about it.

Which brings me back to what I said. Assume all the current bans are in place as they should be, and only look at the new bans on a day by day basis - and if there aren't matching posts for them, there's a problem.

[adraqdemic]

Ok guys, thanks for your help