The self banning or the farewell hack (The AutoBahn)

This is yet another way to ban a user from your board.

This hack is a little fun project I thought of given some of the recent events in my forums. We have had a few "trouble makers" on our board who got slammed pretty hard by the board moderators quite rightfully. And they got their fragile feelings hurt and posted threads stating that they never wanted to post on the board and so on so forth...

So I came up with the idea of the Farewell Hack, or as I call it the AutoBahn Hack. As the name suggests, the hack allows a person to automatically ban himself from the board. The unsuspecting victim will post a new thread and type some angry messages in there, and all of a sudden, he is not able to access the board. He has been banned. The hack posts a reply to the thread stating that the person is banend. The thread gets locked, and the person receives an Email notice informing him that he has been banned.

This is the reply given to the post:

Your post indicates that you no longer wish to be a member of this site.

Your ID has been banned.

Contact the site administrators about reinstating your account.

Good bye.

The hack tries to identify certain phrases in the post by performing a series of regex matches and if it finds a match it deems that thread as a farewell thread.

The hack is quite simple. It adds a new .php file to your forums directory and requires a small change to newthread.php.

And yes, mods and admins are immune to this hack.

farewell.php can be slightly tweaked to work according to your board configuration.

The variable $bot_ip is set to 127.0.0.1. You can change it to the IP address of your board.
The variable $admin_uid is set to 1. You can set it to the user ID of anyone on your board.
In the $patterns array, replace "myboard.com" with the name of your board.
Feel free to add patterns of your own to the list. Be suer to follow the rules for regular expression mathces.
And pardon the little profanity in the list.

[Logik]

This is a slick hack. Very useful

[Zelda-King]

I love it! One thing though. Why are they converted to usergroupid 9 as opposed to 8 (the default bangroup)? I'm assuming your bangroup is 9 but most people's are 8. The one I'm using is 10 actually, but that's custom.

[Zzed]

Thank you guys.

Zelda-King, I thought 9 was the standard usergroup ID for banned users.

[Link14716]

Yea, 8 is the standard, but they also may be 10, 11, 9349853, etc.

Better make that a variable to edit in the config.

I'll install this once I am able to log into my FTP... damn, it's going tooooo sloooooow.

[Logik]

I hate when that happens.
Its probably some wanna-be-hacker pingin your host's IP.

[Mike11212]

lol i would install this but I got a few members who get a kick out of doing this and and I just love making them look like idiots and it might ban those who don't want to be banned

[Zelda-King]

We could think up some extra phrases here that people might actually use. I had fun thinking up a few last night.

Usergroupid 9. I don't have one. It was a custom usergroup which I've deleted. The hack therefore just set users to usergroup 4 (COPPA/Users Awaiting Moderation).

The problem with the usergroup 'Banned by Moderators' is it's created when a moderator first bans. If you've already added usergroups prior to that then the usergroupid for it will be different. If you don't add any usergroups then it should be 8. At least I think that's how it works.

[Dean C]

Just amazing zzed !

[ryancooper]

This is a Great hack. personally i won;t use it but I love it!! LOL

[Zelda-King]

When I post only one word of a 'ban phrase' I get the attached error. Everything seems to still function normally, and the user isn't banned without saying the rest of it but I get the error come up briefly nevertheless.

For example, if a ban sentence is "I'm leaving" and I post the word 'leaving' in a different context, there's that error.

One word is enough to make the post require farewell.php. Isn't there a way of making it not do that unless all criteria are met for an autoban?