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]

Wow I never thought anyone would have interest in a 3.5 version. I'll see if I can turn it into a plugin.

[KidCharlemane]

Originally Posted by Zzed

Wow I never thought anyone would have interest in a 3.5 version. I'll see if I can turn it into a plugin.

Please do.. I could SO use this.

I get so many "This forum sucks. Please delete my account and all of my posts" posts, this would be ownage to those guys.

[CypherSTL]

I do a gaming forum and get some ppl that always want to flame it, and this would be a great way to help with the moderation of things like that, useing automation instead of manpower to have to deal with it...thats gets tedious.

Would love this on 3.5.x