Display Ban Reason on Error Page?
 

Well I switched to vB3 maybe a week or so ago, however now whenever a user is banned, they just get the generic error page. So obviously I get a LOT of emails every time a user is temp-banned, asking what happened to their account, then I have to explain why and how much longer they will be banned... an extreme pain.

When I was running vB2, I had the temp-ban hack installed, which gave them a reason and time left... but vB3 doesn't seem to have this feature.

I tried searching but couldn't find a hack that would display those two simple features (ban reason and time left). Has one been made yet, or am I going to have to go making this for myself?

If one hasn't been made, does anyone else find this missing feature as annoying as I do? *sigh*

Well, I got tired of waiting, so I made a quicky hack, basically if the user is banned it displays a page telling them they are banned, and for how long.

It's just one function, one template addition, and about 3 lines of code in the functions.php file if anyone is interested.

Here's the instructions since someone requested them...

1 template addition
1 function addition
1 template change

Like I said, it was quick and dirty, but it works... better than a banned user getting the generic "no permissions" page...

I just changed mine to where it reads 'you're banned because you pissed admin off - here's how to contact him to resolve the situation'.

:D

Very nice hack !
you should submit it to vB3 team :)

what about adding who banned them, since it does list that

to get rid off blood war :devious:

Thank you i installed it
and its great :D

ps you should release this as i'm sure more people would find this useful

ps could u edit it slightly to include permenant bans
coz it looks silly when saying you are banned

would be better if it says

you are permenantly banned
If you have any questions as to why you were banned, feel free to PM or email the staff.

for that screen

this is good and i have it installed but can anyone make it so mods/admins can type in a reason for the temp ban and have that display on the error page? this current is just a general with the time

also to temp ban for only X hours would be great too

I get this error when I upload the modofied functions.php

Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING in /home2/public_html/forums/includes/functions.php on line 1864


line 1864 is this but it's nowhere near where I did the modification:

I get teh same error on line 1864

Rather than do a hack, I created a special forum for the banned:

Village of the Banned
You're here because you were banned. If you need clarification start a thread and a moderator will respond.

Permissions are set so it can only be viewed by banned members, admins, mods & supermods, and when a member is banned that's the ONLY forum they can view so they know they're banned. Banned members can only see and reply to their own threads. I rarely get email involving bannings since I set this up 3 months ago. You can set the policy anyway that's best for you, but mine is that only the mod who did the actual banning should respond, and if they're not around an admin will handle it.

Can you tell me the exact steps you went through to make this possible? Each time I try to do this I make the forum etc, and when I ban someone they get the no permission screen, even though the permissions are set. Does this apply to temp bans, or people I've specifically moved to the banned usergroup? The reason I'm asking is that mods can't specifically ban people, they can only temp ban them

instead of banning them, change the banned group to only have access to that forum. hide the forum from the rest of the users though. when you want to "ban" someone, put them in the banned group.

That's all very well, but when a moderator places a temp ban on someone it moves them to the usergroup that during setup was explicitly named as a banned user group, therefore all they ever see are no permissions. For the village of the banned to work, admins have to manually move users over to that group, which makes all the modertors redundant since I'm not about to grant admin access to all my moderators.

Banned users all go into the same usergroup, "Banned by Moderators" so it applies to all bans (temp or perm). Here's the way I did it:

1) Setup new forum with No Parent, named it Village of the Banned and stuck it on the bottom of my board.

2) Under Forums & Moderators click on Forum Permissions, find your ban forum and click Deny All. Then add permissions for the specific usergroups you want to be able to use the forum and set their privileges however you prefer.

That's all there is to it. I'm guessing yours isn't working right because you made it a subforum. If you make it a subforum you also have to add permissions for the banned usergroup to it's parent forum.

Nah I'll tell you what it was... my pervious Usergroup "Banned" had permissions set to no for everything, so the usergroup permission were taking priority over the forum permissions.

Id like to see this hack myself.....

In my opinion the solution using a forum is far better than a hack. No code to add, nothing. :)

This shouldn't even have to be a hack... A "ban reason" should of been implemented as a base feature in vB3... I don't know why they don't have it yet... I'm sure every forum admin is tired of people emailing them asking why they get banned...

eoc_Jason, your Ban Info hack doesn't work (at least for me) in 3.0.7 Any chance of an update?

This mod is really really fubared.

A couple of my members occasionally get the message that they were banned. When i go to check in admincp, they are not in banned group. I just disabled the hack and one of them who was just having this problem again was able to get in.

Any ideas why its doing this? I'm using VB 3.0.17