UPDATED!!! AGAIN!

This is a more effective solution than the standard "ban", and is meant to be used for very annoying troublemakers that keeps re-registering once banned. Anyway - once a user is placed under the "Hellban", the following happens:

1. Every 3:d time the user tries to load a page, he is greeted with a fake "500 Internal Server Error" message.

2. Nobody but moderators and the user himself can see his posts. He is, essentially, under a site-wide ignore.

This may not be a 100% fail-safe solution, but a lot of the morons will hopefully get tired and go away.

Here is how it's done:

1. Run the following query on your database:

INSERT INTO usergroup VALUES("666","Hellban","","0","1","1","1","1","0", "1","0","0","0","1","1","1","1","0","0","1","1","1 ","0","0","1","0","0","0","0","0","0","0","0","1") ;
ALTER TABLE post ADD hellban INT UNSIGNED;
ALTER TABLE thread ADD hellban INT UNSIGNED;

2. Add this at the bottom of you global.php
3. Find this in newreply.php:
REPLACE it with this:

4. find this in newthread.php

in that file, also find this:

After that, find this:

and replace with this:

I showthread.php, find this:
Replace with this:

in forumdisplay.php, find this:

Replace that with this:

Now, whenever you want to get rid of a user, simply set him or her to usergroup Hellban.

Interesting.... Might check it out sometime....

nice thanx

I may install this for those users that keep registering multiple names even though they were asked nicely not to register more than once :D - That will teach them to listen ;)

SaintDog

Just to be clear, this hack basically puts a certain username in torture mode. Instead of banning him, you let him in and toy with him. But what's to prevent the user from re-registering yet again and escaping the hellban? Or does this hack somehow detect that?

He hack is meant for the idiots that just keep re-registering even though they are banned over and over again due to their idiotic behavior. Toying or torture has nothing to do with it.

There is nothing to prevent the user from re-registering, and I don't think there ever will be, as the use can just delete the vbulletin cookie, EXCEPT for the fact that he might not be aware of hellban, unlike the standard ban.

This hack is meant to be silent (i.e. the banned used is unaware of it), and only meant for extreme troublemakers. It's meant to make terrorizing the forums a much less pleasureable experience (i.e. annoying error messages and no responses to his flamebaits). Some may discover that they are being fooled, but some (hopefully) will simply be bored and walk away.

I like this, except for the JOIN on the table that it adds with every showthread. Maybe a more efficient solution would be to modify newreply and newthread so that whenever a 666-user posts, it is automatically made visible=0? Or would that put it in the moderation queue...

Have you run this on a sizeable board and is there much of a hit with the join?

I don't know much about database performance - are joins that heavy? You solution would be better performance-wise, but it would take away the advantage of the user seeing his own posts. If they were invisible, he/she would probably get suspicious.

The solution would be to add a "hellban" column to the post table... I'll see what I can do.

Joins are heavy on the database when they are done on large tables... post and user are 2 of the biggest tables in vB, so it should make things slower.

Adding a hellban flag to the post table would be ok, but bear in mind that even if you take a user out of that usergroup his older posts will still remain hidden.

Oh yes - I guess that makes sense. And so I have learned another thing! :pleased:

As for the remain-hidden issue, the only solution I can think of is to add a little admin interface for it, but it seems overkill, as this is pretty much a last-resort-ban.