Forum bans people randomly

Started by wtfwtf, February 22, 2018, 11:43:15 AM

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wtfwtf

i have run several forums in the past,
i like the smf functionalities, so thought of giving it a try,
launched a new forum, now it's quite busy one,
and to my surprise the forum just bans people randomly
i have to change cookies and clear cahe everytime i know of a ban, and tell the user to stay.
but how many bans go unnoticed!!!
i have at least 1 incident of someone telling me about a ban every 48h, i wonder how many users get banned and silently chose to go to another site !!!

the biggest challenge is growing the userbase, this software works against webmasters !!!
and i have seen this problem reported before 2011 -2013 ...
and not yet resolved , what a joke

i am now looking to transfer my forum to another forum software, because if such a huge problem is not taken care of, i wonder what is!

d3vcho

SMF doesn't ban users by default, so there should be something on your side that's caussing the issue. What mods do you have installed on you forum? Are there other people with privileges to ban users?
"Greeting Death as an old friend, they departed this life as equals"

Kindred

As d3vcho says, what you indicate is not and never has been an actual issue in this software.

You say that you saw it reported 2011-2013 -- I can't find such threads, but, I guarantee that, if you actually read the whole thread, you will find that the issue was always due to a badly coded or misconfigured mod - not anything in the core product.

SMF does not EVER auto-create bans in the core product, therefore, any instance of bans being auto-created would be due to some mod or changed code that you implemented. Any instance of you being caught up in someone else's ban also suggest that you are using a proxy service (which means that you should avoid IP bans entirely)
Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

I have been running SMF from 2005, and been around this forum since 2007 I think, and can not for the life of me think of what issue you are referring to. I've never seen anything like what you are describing, occur in a vanilla installation.
Slava
Ukraini!


"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

How you can help SMF

Doug Heffernan

When I installed Smf a couple of days ago it banned me right away :D

Joking aside, Smf does not auto ban users the way that you described. Have you installed any modification against spamming or any other security mod that has banning as an option if certain things occur?

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

Quote from: doug_ips on February 22, 2018, 01:51:32 PM
When I installed Smf a couple of days ago it banned me right away :D
Oh, but that is completely intentional. That's the brand new "Are you actually qualified to run a forum?" -test, done on all new installations. But that's not what the OP is talking about I think.

( Sadly, I think I need to clarify that this post is a joke. No such test exists in real life. )
Slava
Ukraini!


"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

How you can help SMF

wtfwtf

here you go guys some reports i found while looking for a solution :

https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=515794.0
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=515223.0

this needs to get addressed urgently.



mods installed:
1.    Log Karma Actions    3.0    
2.    Ad Managment    3.3a    
3.    Misc Anti Spam    1.0    
4.    Yet Another YouTube BBCode Tag    4.7    
5.    SMF_Points    0.2    
6.    Referrals System    3.2    
7.    SMF 2.0.15 Update    1.0    
8.    Fake Topic Views    0.1    
9.    Advance Fake Guests n Users Online (fguo)    1.0

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

Now, both of those are support requests with very little data to work with - and one of them for 1.1, the other for 2.0.

What kind of bans do you have in place right now, and what do you use as triggers?
IP addresses? Ranges? Hostnames?
Slava
Ukraini!


"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

How you can help SMF

wtfwtf

Quote from: Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen on February 22, 2018, 02:27:54 PM
Now, both of those are support requests with very little data to work with - and one of them for 1.1, the other for 2.0.

What kind of bans do you have in place right now, and what do you use as triggers?
IP addresses? Ranges? Hostnames?

i use email bans no ip bans,
this is not an issue based on triggers
the banned people do not even appear banned for admin, they simply can no longer login and get the
"Sorry Guest, you are banned from using this forum!
This ban is not set to expire."

there is no record whatsoever of this ban on the system, thus the amount of people banned is actually unknown

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

OK, then when people get this message - does it show in your forum's error log? It should, if it was SMF causing it.
Who are you hosted with? I'm thinking, this could just be a caching issue caused by a cache your host is running.
Slava
Ukraini!


"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

How you can help SMF

wtfwtf

i don't know , it is probabbly logged.

PS: it might be of use: i use cloudflare for ddoss attacks prevention or traffic surge

Illori

you need to check if it is logged or not, it could be your cloudflare that is blocking users.

a10

Strange, I've used this 'worst software ever' for a dozen years, and never encountered any ghost activity.

Am guessing: server caching (host).
2.0.19, php 8.0.23, MariaDB 10.5.15. Mods: Contact Page, Like Posts, Responsive Curve, Search Focus Dropdown, Add Join Date to Post.

Bigguy

Been here since '05, never once been banned on my own forum. I don't think, lol.

Kindred

just to reiterate: You say "This needs to get addressed urgently" and yet we have never actually seen anyone have this issue.  Some of us have been running SMF for over a decade.

With the threads that you linked:
1 was almost certainly due to one or more of their mods -- but the user never confirmed what the issue was. However, since the user had a working site shortly after that post, obviously, it was corrected without any further input from us.

the other is clearly an IP ban gone wrong.
If you use Cloudflare or a proxy with an IP ban, you can indeed ban EVERYONE form your site, because all incoming IPs appear to be the proxy server, not the originator.



However, without something from the SMF log, we can't really help much.... none of your mods look like they would affect bans - but you could always just remove all bans to start with....
Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

#15
I do hope your experience of this the official support forum of the worst forum software ever has at least shown that we do not just ignore reports like this.

Quote from: wtfwtf on February 22, 2018, 02:59:38 PM
i don't know , it is probabbly logged.
Please, if you want us to look further in to this issue, do make sure of this and let us know.

So, when you next encounter this issue, check your logs, and tell us if there is anything that might be related.
Without those log entries being generated, it is almost certainly not an issue in SMF, which then would mean you should talk to your host and ask them what kind of caching they have setup. Specifically you may want to ask if they are running Varnish, and if they could disable it for your forum installation.
Slava
Ukraini!


"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

How you can help SMF

wtfwtf

users randomly banned are appearing in the ban log
but also found out many ips are being banned, there are no ban triggers on these ips
thus i suspect it's the same issue.

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

If they appear in the ban log, then they must have hit a trigger.

If you look at Admin -> Members -> Ban List -> Browse ban triggers

Is there any trigger that seems to have an unusual amount of hits?
Are there any triggers that use wildcards?
Slava
Ukraini!


"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

How you can help SMF

Biology Forums

This happened to me once, when I logged into an IP that I banned for testing purposes. It was a disaster.

However it doesn't happen randomly, it was my fault technically.

Steve

With a subject line like that I'm surprised you've gotten so much help. You might want to actually read the responses and accept them as fact.
DO NOT pm me for support!

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