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

[BirdOPrey5]

If a user is banned he or she can't view the forum at all- how can they report a post?

[stardotstar]

Hi BirdOPrey5 and thanks for highlighting the exact issue I found!

With standard banning the issue never arises.

Full banning excludes the member from the forums and so I created groups with permissions to browse but not post. The yellow card is less restricitve than the red card group which completely excludes the member from particular areas like off-topic, classifieds etc.

When you make a group a banned group (Group is Not a Banned Group = No) it becomes a group you can select in the dropdown when banning:



See the "move to usergroup" --> this is usually just Banned.



What we have found is that becuase banning is so final and completely excludes the user and infractions are so proceedural (ie swearing = infraction) and usually water off a ducks back; we find that there is no good intermediate position.

Most of the time when we want to nip something in the bud we get a series of PMs from mods to tell a member to pull their head in or change some general pattern of behavior that is, for example, agains the "spirit" of the rules more than the letter and they often take exception and bring the fight to the centre stage. What can be a simple matter of a dispute between two members which brings a moderator into it ends up being front page headlines and an invitation for all the usual suspects to pile in and stir up some carnage.

The idea is that if a member gets hot under the collar about some moderator action or other issue and they need to be given a chance to cool down before they take their next dozen posts to a whole new level of escalation they can be treated as though they are arguing with a ref on the field - Whistle blows and --- you are out of here - half and hour on the bench in a game may translate to a 1 day or 7 day yellow card on the site. This means that they can continue to watch the game and are not completely excluded but they are unable to continue with a posting behavior of vexatious or antagonistic argument.

Some of the usual agitators may end up wearing some "cards" with pride and that is also ok becuase they know that they are gagged when they are carded and if they come back on worse than ever it will escalate to red and then a full ban. At each stage we can control the level and length better than just a complete ban which often provides less access than unlogged in.

I am trying to work out the best way to make the refereeing and moderating more like a game than the kind of "blown-out-of-all-proportions-do-or-die" escalation that so often happens and causes so much collateral damage along the way.

This way the mod team can say - this guy is out of line, has been warned and is persisting in activity that will see his posts pulled and new ones started straight away, bringing in backup and all sorts of additional fallout - so, take a seat on the bench and calm down.

Now... To the point of this thread. When testing the permissions - restrictions on the blog, which forums they can access, ability to post in visitor messgaes, or EDIT their original posts - or change their attachments etc we found that the permissions system is more than adequeue for the task - but one of my testers used the test account to report a series of posts from within the forum, and this ably demonstrated that it would be a way that a member who has been carded could still sit on the sidelines and yell at the umpires and refs :lol: - instead of having to ignore that or put up with it I disabled the post report function for members of that group.

There may in fact be better ways to implement this kind of disciplinary system and I had a bit of a look around at the various hacks and decided that some simple graphics, some permissions wrangling and a change or two in the phrasing of the ban system would at least be worth a try.



I hope it works better than the experience we have had in the past where such small issues can end up with major arguments and hate-fests - so unnecessary, so disruptive and disappointing for the greater majority of members who have no problem with the rules or how to conduct themselves.



I have made an effort to expand on my concept simply because I am working hard on making sure it is as good as I can make it without over complicating things.

I also hope that it helps people searching or googling this kind of situation.

Cheers,
Will

[BirdOPrey5]

There's a lot to read there but if you have a 'yellowcard' usergroup that can view the forums but not post and you want to stop them from reporting a post then just put the report post graphic(and link) in an if statement to not display it to the yellowcard usergroup. The exact syntax of this I'm not sure off hand but it's commonly used in examples all around the site. I think it may be:
<if condition="$bbuserinfo['usergroup'] == x"> {nothing} <else /> {report link code here} </if>
where x is the usergroup id number of your yellowcard group.

In terms of non-complete bannings though I have had bad luck with them. I used to have a forum called 'Alcatraz' where 'banned' users could post without any advanced bb code features, sigs, or such... regular users can visit Alcatraz to 'taunt' the prisoners and such and it was good fun for a time until some people got so pissed off they would slow down the site by continually reloading the forum over and over again- giving them access to any forum, even if only read only, a single determined user can initiate enough queries to slow down and clog the site- so ultimately I had to go to complete bans because that way if they hit refresh a lot there was only 1, if any, queries generated.

[James Birkett]

Create a plugin on postbit_display_complete with the code:

PHP Code:

if(is_member_of($bbuserinfo,  X, Y, Z))
{
    $show['reportlink'] = false;
} 


Replace the X, Y, Z with the usergroup(s) you wish to omit from seeing the report link.

Also, disabling the report link I wouldn't do really, seems like stopping people reporting posts is giving your moderators more work.

[stardotstar]

then just put the report post graphic(and link) in an if statement to not display it to the yellowcard usergroup.

That's what I did, its in my first post. I only posted because I thought it might help others and on googling it I saw people had run into the problem but not posted a solution.

if(is_member_of($bbuserinfo,  X, Y, Z))
{
    $show['reportlink'] = false;
}

James, this is another really great way of doing it - I assume this is the flag that is set for guests and other groups who shouldn't be able to report - thank you.

As for disabling post reports from people who are already too much hard work - all I wanted to do was give people no alternative but sit on the bench for a few days or a week without being completely excluded.

It may not work but seems to have been well received in principal by the mod team.

Certainly won't suit all.

I don't want this to become some kind of contentious issue. I just thought it might be an interesting take on what might be a common problem.

[djarm67]

Thanks for this. Just had a group of spammers targeting this one over the last few days.

DJ