Quick solution to prevent a banned group member reporting posts

[stardotstar]

Hi all,

I have been working up a yellow/red card system on my forums using member groups assigned as banned groups.

The idea was to allow the members to be able to browse and see all the usually exposed content with a yellow card and progressively add more restrictions with say two yellow cards and then ultimately a red card and finally a full ban.

We are trying to use the idea that if users get carded rather than receive a "ban" it is less formal and seems more "game-like" - accept the ref's decision. There is a place they can post specifically to complain or represent a defense but it is out of sight. The main idea is to prevent them from playing - ie watch the game but not play - read but not post.

So... I was easily able to add a red or yellow card graphic conditional based on the usergroups in the post bit and the rest was done with the permissions of the groups and checking the custom permissions by forum where necessary.

Finally I found that the user was still able to "report" posts and when I googled I found that this had been noticed before on vbulletin.com

Well that's a problem because it gives banned users an opportunity to send a message to the moderators to **** off!

No solution was offered so I worked up the following conditional in postbit to allow banned user group ids to be specified and prevent access to the report post function:

<if condition="!is_member_of($bbuserinfo, 140,141)">
			<if condition="$show['reportlink']"><a href="report.php?$session[sessionurl]p=$post[postid]" rel="nofollow"><img class="inlineimg" src="$stylevar[imgdir_button]/report.gif" alt="$vbphrase[report_bad_post]" border="0" /></a> &nbsp;</if>
</if>

Noe that this is just an additional conditional wrapping the standard <if condition="$show['reportlink']"> - the conditional works normally as long as the member is not a member of user-groups 140 and 141 in my case...

If anyone can see anything wrong with the application of this fix I would be happy to hear because it is hardly anything more than a patch but seems to work without other harm.

Thought I'd post it since it may help someone else trying some different approaches to banning and user discipline with the inbuild banning system.

The overall effect looks quite good - the user gets a card in their post bit they can see what they are missing during their outage but can't persist in the kind of behavior that caused the card to be issued. Because it is analogous to a game it feels less like the "final solution: banning" to them (I hope).

Best regards
Will