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.

[Zzed]

Here are 2 samples of this hack in action:

http://www.ls1.com/forums/showthread...hreadid=287146
http://www.ls1.com/forums/showthread...hreadid=287156

[KelteN]

lol thats cool

[SmartGnome]

Zzed you made my day :banana:

I have the same on our board, so much users that there are always troublemakers among them.

I will install this tonight

Thanks from all of the the KrissiTeam !!


Greetz


Btw: how do you manage that greetings to us and the workaround the serverload message. I'm interested in that to

[Zzed]

Today at 01:30 PM SmartGnome said this in Post #4
Zzed you made my day :banana:

I have the same on our board, so much users that there are always troublemakers among them.

I will install this tonight

Thanks from all of the the KrissiTeam !!


Greetz


Btw: how do you manage that greetings to us and the workaround the serverload message. I'm interested in that to

Thank you for your kind words SmartGnome.

I have a hack that disables guest access to my board when the server load is too high. I got a few complaints form people here that they could not see the board during high server loads. So I made a little exception to allow vb.org visitors see the threads that are linked from here.

It's quite a simple hack actually.

[Dan]

I think I shall install it on my board once I get time..... maybe useful for the idiots that occasionally grace my board.

[drumsy]

Is there a brief tutorial you can give on modifying the $patterns array?

[Mephisteus]

Nice hack Going to install it right away

[Zzed]

Today at 01:53 PM drumsy said this in Post #7
Is there a brief tutorial you can give on modifying the $patterns array?

Hmm...

To do simple matches you can just type in phrases that look like this:

"/I am leaving this forum/i"

Your pattern should start with / and it should end with /i. That will make it case insensitive. This will match any post containing the above statement. You can add as many simple patterns as you want without getting fancy.

But if you want to get fancy, I suggest a little light reading on regular expressions:

http://www.living-source.com/user/ad..._tutorial.html
http://gnosis.cx/publish/programming...pressions.html

[Boofo]

Today at 03:41 PM Zzed said this in Post #5
Thank you for your kind words SmartGnome.

I have a hack that disables guest access to my board when the server load is too high. I got a few complaints form people here that they could not see the board during high server loads. So I made a little exception to allow vb.org visitors see the threads that are linked from here.

It's quite a simple hack actually.

I'd like to have that. I also don't allow guests to view messages but would like to be able to allow vb.org people to see threads that I link from here (and only here, if possible).