Just opened up imported forums, and many users are banned.

[Mulet]

Hey,

This is my story:

1) Spam loaded PHPBB3 forums closed
2) New vBulletin v4.17 forums, installed and closed.
3) Impex imports PHPBB3 content
4) Mods in vBulletin installed:
- isbot
- vb stop forum spam
- Spam decimator
- vb advanced forums permissions
5) Used spam decimator remove and ban all spam. (thousands of threads, posts and few hundred users)
6) Tested a few imported users. Works well.
7) Opened forums, sent out mass email
8) Users attempting to log in again, now finding they are banned.

What would be the cause of the false mass bannings? I assume ip banning?

--------------- Added 1319696957 at 1319696957 ---------------

It's not ip banning.

I've just tried recovering one of the banned accounts myself, using one of my emails, from my location and the user is banned.

But this user is not present in the banned users list in AdminCP->users

--------------- Added 1319697499 at 1319697499 ---------------

There were two usergroups imported from PHPBB3.

REGISTERED
NEWLY_REGISTERED_USERS

Both of these had all permissions set to no, and was the primary usergroups of many users. I'm waiting on a handful of users to get back to me, but methinks I fixed it.

[kh99]

I think you did fix it. If a user has no permissions, for some reason the message they get says they have been banned.

[Mulet]

You again kh99!

It would be nice if vbulletin would say soemthing else other than banned. It's upset a few people (my bad really)

I also had a third group imported, special users who helped me during a private engine test. They also defaulted to no permissions.

Am I using it right? I've created ENGINE TESTERS group to give access to a private forum.

[kh99]

Yeah, it's me again.

Yes, I think creating a new group with extra permissions is a good way to give access to a private forum.

I agree it would be better to have a more accurate message. If I remember correctly there's an "if" statement in the code somewhere checking several reasons why a user might not have access, and if it fails it shows that one message. I guess it's probably been that way for a long time, and banned users is probably the most likely cause (because really there's not much reason to have a group with no permisssions :).

This is probably obvious now, but you could create yourself a "regular" user account so you can log in and see what a normal user would see.