Geeklog Forums

Short of deleting a user from GL or changing his email address and password to stop him for using the site, how can I stop a user from contributing to the Sections of Forum, to allow him a cooling down period. I tried creating a group called \"Banned\" without any permission but it doesn\'t seem to work.

The forum plugin has an IP management option in the admin menu. login as admin and goto the following: http://www.yourdomain.com/admin/plugins/forum/ips.php

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-- destr0yr
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -- Douglas Adams

Thanks Destr0yer. How about managing contributions in the Sections in Geeklog as well as comments? How can Admin stop dialogue for an individual? Thanks

I don\'t know about individual baning but in config.php there is this Submission Settings. If you\'ll enable all them, all submitted materials are sent for moderation. I think this way you can reject the unwanted content.

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Geeklog Polish Support Team

Hi Robin I took a look at your suggestion. This will work albeit a little cumbersome for the following reason. My site allows for members to contribute. Typically, there isn\'t any restrictions. However, when we encounter an irate user who is abusing his membership, it doesn\'t make sense to switch the moderation option which will require the admin to read thru all contributions just to stop this one person. Another problem arises.. The irate user doesn\'t have to make a new submission. He can simply add comments to existing contributions, ie. create \"graffitti\" on the site. As comments, these comments are not email to admin, which makes cleaning up a bit of a pain. I was hoping to find a flag in Users or Group that could allow admin to temporarily contain the person for a cooling down period for him to regain himself. Maybe the development team can consider creating a \"no permission\" flag in Group for this very purpose, it isn\'t already available. Thank you.

You can make visitors log in before posting stories and comments by setting these variables inside config.php to 1:

$_CONF['submitloginrequired'] = 0;
$_CONF['commentsloginrequired'] = 0;

Once a logged-in person needs a time-out, I think you should be able to suspend his posting privileges by going into the User Editor and removing the check by "Logged-in Users" under his name. I haven't tested this out, but if it doesn't work, then you ought to submit a bug report so it gets fixed. If you are allowing anonymous posting, then you can use .htaccess to ban his IP which won't work too long if he's assigned a dynamic one.

Dear Rawdata Thank you for your response. Our variables have been set for submitloginrequired = 1, and commentsloginrequired =1. I have tried removing the check for Logged-in Users but members can still submit articles as well as comments. While admin can control contributions due to notifications, we cannot control comments. We can\'t use .htaccess to ban the IP because, where we are, the IP is a proxy server and so many people use the same IP address. Thanks for your suggestions.

After looking thru the code, I think this is more of a feature request than a bug. The script checks whether the visitor has a valid logged in username and not whether he is in the \"Logged-in Users\" Group like I assumed. What I suggested definitely won\'t work as you confirmed. Sorry.

I created a hack though to give basic banning capability. You can download it here and try it out on your system. It works fine on my test site, but let me know if you run into any bugs. Basically, how it works is you create a new user group named \"Banned\" and add offenders to it. If the person being banned is logged in or has cookies set to log in later, the script will forcibly log him out the very next time he tries to access a function which you have set for registered users only. Once logged out, he won\'t be able to get back in again under that username until you remove him from the Banned Group. This should help a little in containing your problem kids.

Again, thank you for the hack. Greatly appreciated. I will try it out.