Banning users

[ampburner]

Hey everyone. I've recently upgraded to 2.2 ....in another post on these forums I criticised the skinning engine and may have come off as someone looking to bash you guys ( ;) ) but I am pretty happy with the software, actually, and I thought I would do well to post something constructive as well, so please hear me out :P

One thing that has always bugged me about IPB is the user interface when it comes to banning and deleting accounts.
Suspending them is pretty simple ...once you come across a post that you feel warrants disciplinary action, you can click their warn meter and add to it immediately...fill out a little form and suspend the account temporarily or indefintely.
Personally, I prefer assigning the user to the 'Banned' user group when it is a permanent ban, so that the rest of the community can see that action has been taken (the offender is now in the 'banned' group) and will know that they no longer have to report their behaviour to the staff.

Also, some times even that isn't enough.
As anyone who has a forum should know, some trolls can be pretty persistent - even if you apply IP bans - and spam the life out of your site with malicious BS.
for example, recently some guy thought it was funny to start 30 threads on my forums about how the administrator

#$%%#$$#$%#% ;)

...and when I got rid of all that crap, he created a bunch of duplicate accounts.

If I want to delete a user (and/or bulk delete all their posts) I need to
- go to the ACP, (new page)
- log in,
- copy paste their name into the search field, (new page)
- find their account in the search results,(new page)
- click on their account name and select the action
- confirm in the next screen.(new page)

That's 6 actions on 4 different pages, and don't get me wrong here....it's a good system and works fine. I'm just saying... most forums out there are managed by volunteers who put a lot of their personal time in that.... dealing with trolls is not exactly the most fun part of the job, and I think that we should seek to make things as easy and intuitive to the administrators and mods as we can, so that they have more time to comfortably focus on the more important aspects of their job (namely, reading the forums, staying informed, and decision making).

I suggest the following
- add a 'ban user permanently' link to the user profile (only when logged with the appropriate authorization in of course)
- same for 'delete all user's posts'
- these links might also be added to the topic view (the username has a neat little dropdown feature now, it could go there)

If we could bring that down to 1 or 2 actions that can be performed from within the 'read topic' screen, it would operate in a much, much smoother way, I think.

I believe that the proper way to design an administrator's user interface is to give them the tools to undo any harm as easily and simply as possible. The idiots and trolls may have us outnumbered, but as long as we've got the tools .... ;)

And yeah, I know, it's not exactly the most exciting feature request you'll see in your careers ...but it's only a small change (all the functionality is there, it's just a matter of rearranging the user experencie I think) and one of my pet peeves.

I would be really curious to know what everyone else thinks.

[Tarun]

There is this mod that is very nice, and I wish it was integrated into IPB in some way. :)