Banned Member Access

[Hyphae.Network]

I'm not sure how everyone else handles banned members, but we have a site that's based upon member contributions and so we rarely, if ever, delete any user accounts as we do not want to lose potentially valuable site data. Auditing a members contributions before a ban would be subjective and a waste of time.

Having said this... We have had members come back after long periods of time to find their accounts banned, or we have new members sign up and your spam service marks them as a spammer and they're auto-banned... In either case we have members trying to get support and understand what the state of their account is in.

When a banned member logs in the board is completely unavailable to them. We have tried setting global announcements but they do not show. We have tried creating a Forum Category/Thread with a message, but it does not show. The board is "offline" to them. They can't even open a support ticket.

So when there may be some confusion as to the state of their account, they have zero methods to understand this nor can we provide any. They simply receive "Sorry, you don't have permission for that!" and that's it.

What about a feature request to handle banned members a little differently? It would be nice if we could make an announcement or something to let all the members of that group know their account has been banned. Even allow them to open a support ticket in case the ban was in error. There are simply zero options for this.

We have tried allowing the banned group to "view the board" and then removed ALL permissions except the announcement and that one banned thread. The issue is by allowing them to view the forum they are allowed to view logged in members, member lists, member status updates, and may other things they should not be able to do even though they have zero other permissions - you cannot control permissions for the items mentioned.

[Aiwa]

The 'banned' group is a legacy group and not necessarily used when banning. There is now a 'flag' that is set on the members account that determines if a member is banned. If so, they are granted 0 permissions and only get the error.

In some cases, I do agree it would be nice to give members a bit of a 'you account is banned, to find out more information contact so and so'. For some communities that would be beneficial, for others not so much.

This might be something that's better left for a hook to hook into that error page and display your custom information if the error is due to the account being banned.

This gets half way there.

'?do=embed' frameborder='0' data-embedContent>>

[William Johnson]

you could always create a new usergroup with limited access and manually place them in that usergroup. It is probably prudent that it be done manually as they are already identified by the spam service.