Some problems with automatic/incremental banning

I don't know if it's just me ... but some of our moderators were complaining about the automatic/incremental banning not working right. So I done some testing and found there to be a problem.

We have it set up so that members are banned for 7 days when they reach 8 warning points, using the incremental bans. They are permanently banned at 32 warning points. So a ban should be given at 8/16/24/32.

The first problem I found is that users were being banned too early. For example, they were being banned at 15 points instead of 16. Which isn't too much of an issue in itself, but when the ban given at 15 was removed and then they were warned again, they were banned again at 16 points. This happened when the ban was manually removed.

The second problem I found was if a member were given a lot of warnings in one day which caused them to exceed two banning levels. Say they reached 8 points and were banned. But not all of their posts were warned, so the mods continued to warn them and they reached 16 points. Instead of extending the ban period to 2 weeks, it stayed at the initial 7 day period. I know this can be changed manually, but it would be nice if it recognized that the person needed to serve a longer ban.

Finally, not really a problem, but more a suggestion, it would be great if when warnings were removed, it would automatically deduct that warning from their warning count instead of keeping it as it is.

Abe Babe...

[sv1cec]

OK, let's clarify this issue here.

A member gets some warnings, and accumulates enough warning points to be banned. The member is banned. If you keep adding warning points to him, the warning points are added to his record, but he doesn't get banned again. When one of his warnings mature, then its points are removed from the member's record. When that happens, the user may still be banned or not, it does not matter. If he is banned and he receives one more point, he is not banned again, just another point is added to his record. If he is not banned and gets some more points, if his total is above the banning limit, he is banned again, if not, nothing happens.

One more thing, the users do not get permanently banned at specific points, but either if they receive a permanent ban warning, or if they are banned enough times to be permanently banned.

As for incremental banning, I think you have misunderstood how it works. In order for a person to be banned for twice the initial banning period, he has to be banned twice. Since he is not banned again, if he is banned once, even if he receives enough points to give him a second ban, the system does not consider him banned again. The reason I did it this way, is because I thought that "OK, the user has been banned, a moderator spotted another post of this member that needs to be warned, he is already banned, so just add the points, no need to ban him again, since obviously, the last post that was warned, was not posted after he was banned, but before.".

The warnings count does not get reduced, for a simple reason. It is an immediate indicator of your user's good behaviour (or bad behaviour I should say). The points get removed, but the warnings stay. In that way, you can see how good a member is, in a glance. If you were to reduce that number, then it won't reflect the real history of that member.

Rgds