Easier Member controls

[frazzled]

I've suggested this before, but I'll try again.

We find several Admin CP control panel features cumbersome when trying to validate new registrations.

1. Could there not be CLICKABLE LINKS in the validation queue? Now you get an email saying new poster devildog has registered. You need to view the profile. You have to type the name in to search for the member. You can get the informatino, but it's like walking out the front door and around the block to get to the back yard. It would be so much easier if you could just walk through the house.

2. Have a clickable member list easily accessible from the front page of the control panel -- links to "last 50 registered members" -- a feature on VBulletin 2 that we used all the time. Yes, you can search for it, but that's another step.

3. Also, it would be nice to have the members' profile info and email address in the email that you get notifying you that there's a new registered memo.

4. Fiinally, a feature I still miss from UBB -- access to the users' password. (UBB has a notification: "The administrators will be able to see your password. Please choose something that you will not mind them seeing.") Why? Two reasons. One, we've had banned members who register under new names wiith new email addresses AND new IPs. But their password remains the same. Second, we have a board with many teenaged girls, and we've had members who were there only to try to get at them, and they would have passwords that made one suspicious that this was their intent :)

[Wolfie]

4.  Fiinally, a feature I still miss from UBB -- access to the users' password.  (UBB has a notification:  "The administrators will be able to see your password.  Please choose something that you will not mind them seeing.")  Why?  Two reasons.  One, we've had banned members who register under new names wiith new email addresses AND new IPs.  But their password remains the same.  Second, we have a board with many teenaged girls, and we've had members who were there only to try to get at them, and they would have passwords that made one suspicious that this was their intent :)

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I can tell you right now that this will not be done. The passwords are encrypted for security reasons and there are MANY people who refuse to sign up on a forum that stores the password itself because of possible abuse.

Also, if someone is intelligent enough to use a different email and different IP address, then they are likely to be smart enough to use a different password as well, making the purpose pointless.

I could understand a feature that might find accounts that share the same password value (ie, same encrypted key), because then the password itself cannot be retrieved but since the odds are against the same password being used by two different people, then it's likely to be the same person.

I could understand the other requests and think they're good ideas, but I'm completely opposed to the password being accessible. I think you'll find other admins feeling the same way.

[frazzled]

Also, if someone is intelligent enough to use a different email and different IP address, then they are likely to be smart enough to use a different password as well, making the purpose pointless.

But, as I wrote above, they were not. One of the people we "caught" this way was a pedophile. Two werre people who'd been banned from the board and came back, time and again, to make trouble under different names (and one of those people was quite computer savvy.)

I don't want to divert the thrread, though, from the primary issues -- numbers 1, 2 and 3 in my initial post.

[Wolfie]

You could always op to require admin validation, and have a required custom profile field (that cannot be viewed by other members) for new sign ups to enter their phone #.

Start that process up and do that for roughly 1 week or for however long that troublemaker tries to return and once they realize that you really do make the calls to validate the accounts, they'll give up. (They'll be traceable if they give a valid phone #, can't validate without a valid #, and even with a valid #, they can't register more than once with the same #). I'm sure you see the logic in what I'm suggesting. Yes, it may be a bit more trouble and may even incur a small expense to do it, but the long term benefit is that this person will be discouraged probably long enough to forget about your site and not return.