Have you banned a member of your forum? I have seen forums that are so lax that members have been posting with the use of abusive language sometimes and they seem to be tolerated. One mod said that they are not strict because they want to be natural (I don’t know what natural means). For the strict forums, I have several friends who were banned. One reason was for copy pasting posts from other forums. I guess that’s a mortal sin huh.
Banning a member
- Thread starter Corzhens
- Start date
Yeah, copying and pasting content is very much frowned upon. In terms of use of foul language, I would say that depends on the niche and population of the forum. For some, it makes sense to allow inappropriate language (within limits) while on others it doesn't fit in with the forum's culture. Irregardless, foul language, flaming, etc. usually aren't offenses which result in an immediate ban, but usually involve warnings, temporary bans, and then if it still continues to be a problem, permanent bans.
Yes! I banned the same member also that keeps on changing IP address and emails and then keeps joining, And so I blocked his IP addressees. It hasn't been to bad with three members banned on my website
We've only had to ban 2 members in almost 6 years. It's a sort of automated process, based on a warning system where our moderators give out points. It starts out only verbally, but can escalate to pre-defined punishment as they're accumulated.
Shannon Apple
Resident
It is difficult to get yourself permanently banned on our forum. There is a set of rules and you have to be pretty shitty to end up permanently banned. There is an escalating scale much like Tucker has, but account suspensions do come under that scale as well. 10 infraction points is 14 day suspension. After that your suspension time increases. If the person is just outright terrible, it might be cause for an outright permaban.
One guy sent me the PM of a lifetime, he shared that PM with other members because he thought he was in the right. It was shown to me on Skype before I got to read it myself. Another admin read it, was like "what the f?" and banned him outright. The members who saw it thought it was terrible, yet hilarious. He got no sympathy after his ban. The same guy had been skirting around the rules for years, never contributed anything worthwhile to community discussions, followed us to Sakuga City and actually got worse because he believed that old rules shouldn't follow. He had been suspended before a couple of times too.
Another twitball went into our IRC chatroom under "disguise" and was banned for a month for linking a porn site. XD
Where do people like this find the time to be idiots?
One guy sent me the PM of a lifetime, he shared that PM with other members because he thought he was in the right. It was shown to me on Skype before I got to read it myself. Another admin read it, was like "what the f?" and banned him outright. The members who saw it thought it was terrible, yet hilarious. He got no sympathy after his ban. The same guy had been skirting around the rules for years, never contributed anything worthwhile to community discussions, followed us to Sakuga City and actually got worse because he believed that old rules shouldn't follow. He had been suspended before a couple of times too.
Another twitball went into our IRC chatroom under "disguise" and was banned for a month for linking a porn site. XD
Where do people like this find the time to be idiots?
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I'm pretty lax about enforcing rules, but when I really have to ban the user, I'll do it. 90% of my moderation has to do with spam, I check profiles to see if the member is a spammer or not - once I deem it as spam, I IP Ban and IP Discourage the IP address or range. Once I've done that, I c&p end of the email address if the domain isn't gmail/hotmail/live/outlook/yahoo, and ban the email from registering. Once all of that is done, I press delete on the spammer. 😀
Google frowns upon c&p posts, so that's why administrators ban users who do them.
Anyway, it takes a lot to piss me off. And when you do, it's your damn fault.
Google frowns upon c&p posts, so that's why administrators ban users who do them.
Anyway, it takes a lot to piss me off. And when you do, it's your damn fault.
And no human spam?
xenForo has some anti-spam features, but no forum software will be able to stop an "entirety of spam registration."
Sorry, I was vague; I was indeed referring to bots.
In regards to human spam, we've only had one occurrence in our history, as it's rare for someone registering to have a site of their own. Human spam doesn't tend to warrant a ban, though.
It has for us over almost 6 years, which is what I'm referring to. Unless you're an extremely prominent site, you're not going to be the target of new threats, so a blacklist like IPB's is quite effective since it collects bot information directly.
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Our family friend's forum that he handles for an organization only blocks spammers particularly those Russian posts. No offense to Russians here. I also wonder why they post spam in Russian when no one can understand it. The blocking is by IP and apparently the spammer will come back with another IP that will again be banned. The cycle continues until the spammer runs out of IP to use. But with banning, the forum is very lenient, there is no record of such in their more than 10 years in the business.
That's why you keep it up with IP bans/discourages. I mean no offense to Russians, but damn, we gotta block that spam.
Nice! 🙂
we all going to get them no matter what
Is the captcha an effective filter in screening the bot's registration? Another question, is the access of bots in the forum does not constitute a hit? What I'm driving at is the hits count of the forum that increases when the bots come around. So in terms of hits count, the bots are contributing. Am I right on this assumption?
Not quite. It's actually the other way around. CAPTCHA is broken right now. For example, Google's reCaptcha was good for a while, until xrumer or similar programs found a way around CAPTCHA by putting all answers into the actual program itself. Likewise, websites such as "StopForumSpam" has been gathering a database of IP's, E-mails, and other info to help forum owners fight against spam in conjunction with CAPTCHA-style programs. xenForo, IPS are leading this charge to put a stop to forum spam with "background" mitigation that keep spam out. On top of that, there are also websites like WhatIsMyIPAddress that help forum owners decide whether the IP is spam, or not.
Also, Google and other major search engines are beginning to filter out "hits" from bots. So, your on-server analytics may look bigger than the ones found in Google Analytics, or similar... That's why, when you sell your websites and you need analytics to back up your claim, Google (or similar) is your friend.
it can if your forum had an system firewall in place that detects there email address and IPs. With that it automatic bans them. But the system doesn't always stop each one of them, one might get passed
Thank you for the comprehensive explanation on the captcha. All the while, I thought the captcha is already a safeguard against bots. Anyway, the hits from bots can be filtered out by Google and other search engines so that means the hits count is not really positively affected by the access of bots.
It must work for some people, but it seems ineffective to others.
What do you mean?
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