James101 Posted September 3, 2020 Posted September 3, 2020 Hi, IPB has an option to flag a user as spammer from the front end through user profile. This hides all user posts/topics. However, when unflagging the user as spammer the topics/posts are still hidden and need to be manually approved again. Is this a bug or can anything be done to fix this? Thank you. aia, Haku2 and rodege5389 2 1
CoffeeCake Posted September 3, 2020 Posted September 3, 2020 22 minutes ago, James101 said: However, when unflagging the user as spammer the topics/posts are still hidden and need to be manually approved again. This is the expected behavior, but it would be nice to have the option to restore what was done. You can configure what flag as spammer does in the ACP and make the delete or hide option be an additional step for the moderator to help guard against this. I don't believe there's any way at present to report back to IPS' spam service that the person you flagged as a spammer is no longer a spammer.
James101 Posted September 3, 2020 Author Posted September 3, 2020 9 minutes ago, Paul E. said: This is the expected behavior, but it would be nice to have the option to restore what was done. You can configure what flag as spammer does in the ACP and make the delete or hide option be an additional step for the moderator to help guard against this. I don't believe there's any way at present to report back to IPS' spam service that the person you flagged as a spammer is no longer a spammer. Hey, Thank you for the quick reply. Fixed it for now. Hopefully IPB figures some way out to fix it automatically. The staff team does not have permission to ban users on my forum and they just flag them as spammers and recently a user with 7k posts was flagged as spammer and that's when I realized this could be a major issue for some boards. rodege5389 and pijasz 2
CoffeeCake Posted September 3, 2020 Posted September 3, 2020 5 minutes ago, James101 said: Hopefully IPB figures some way out to fix it automatically. Open a post in the feedback/ideas forum. That seems to be the way they accept feature requests. 🙂 Another nice add would be to be able to only apply the "hide all/delete all" automatically when the affected number of content is less than some configured value. Auto hide anyone with 10 posts or less, but require a moderator to intentionally delete/hide posts for numbers larger than that.
James101 Posted September 3, 2020 Author Posted September 3, 2020 Hey, That seems like a nice feature. Will post it in the ideas forum. Thank you!
bfarber Posted September 4, 2020 Posted September 4, 2020 The fundamental issue is that we don't track which content items and comments were hidden due to flagging as a spammer, so we can't unhide only those things.
aia Posted September 4, 2020 Posted September 4, 2020 (edited) 3 hours ago, bfarber said: The fundamental issue is that we don't track which content items and comments were hidden due to flagging as a spammer, so we can't unhide only those things. I hope this will be fixed in the future. We need this feature working this way. This flaw is the reason why the "Flag as spammer" feature is completely disabled on my communities. It's too dangerous since its irreversible. Edited September 4, 2020 by Mr 13 Haku2 1
Ocean West Posted September 4, 2020 Posted September 4, 2020 This feature really needs a limit as to what groups can and cannot be flagged as spammer. Usually anyone with more the 10 posts are not spammers. I use promotion feature. Curious - 0 posts Newbie - 1 - 5 Posts ( first one must be approved ) can only make so many posts in a day (flood control) Member - 6+ posts There is no way that any one who is a member with thousands of posts is a spammer, therefore this feature should have an exclusion list of groups. Also flag as spammer while using the HIDE option does not remove the naked pictures they may post in their profile. If a person is BANNED as legitimate spammer then this: CoffeeCake 1
CoffeeCake Posted September 4, 2020 Posted September 4, 2020 31 minutes ago, Ocean West said: There is no way that any one who is a member with thousands of posts is a spammer, therefore this feature should have an exclusion list of groups. I like this, but I also think it should have a content count basis as well. The issue is the restoration effort in case of mistake. Your approach would work for us too, yet our promotions have time involved as well, so someone brand new could theoretically post 200 times. I think that's a interim workaround is that moderators would need to go to the user's activity and select their posts from there for deletion, however if it's group based, it may involve moving them into the "can delete spam" first as a safety mechanism. Maybe we'll spin this up and put it on the marketplace to be able to see whatever is in the secret forums that seem to be full of good information for developers that don't offer things here.
Ocean West Posted September 4, 2020 Posted September 4, 2020 knock on wood but the future is only open to my moderators - if by chance one when off the rails and willy nilly flagged legacy members as spammers - that would swiss cheese the site. Moderators who have as spam option should be restricted to which groups this feature works on - perhaps then i could use the "DELETE" option and not see pink post. right now i have it so that if two or more users report post as spam then it flags as spam and hides stuff that is restricted only to the newbie group - the hiding part is where it's tricky 99% of the time it is real crap but i still see it some times. When is see all them pink hidden posts i loose enjoyment of actually participating in my own site having to put on my admin hat. And yet that leaves users profile stuff visible (profile picts etc) I thought of turning all that stuff off until they get to be a member but i found that leaving it on i can use bad word filters to look for Dheli models or Escorts as terms and hide the post as this stuff gets dumped in the spammers profile. couldn't a json object/array (of ID's) be stored of all content that has been hidden for a spammer so that in case an un-flag and restore option is performed a list is presented and admin can in bulk or individually restore content?
CoffeeCake Posted September 4, 2020 Posted September 4, 2020 (edited) 21 minutes ago, Ocean West said: couldn't a json object/array (of ID's) be stored of all content that has been hidden for a spammer so that in case an un-flag and restore option is performed a list is presented and admin can in bulk or individually restore content? Agree with all your points. It's entirely possible for IPS to record what was hidden by the "mark as spammer" option, yet it's just not working that way at present and the question becomes whether or not it's worth their time to develop that functionality. Our community had this very thing happen. A member who had been gone for some time, had thousands of posts over the years, and suddenly came back was mistaken by a moderator to be a new user posting spammy things. The post itself looked spammy, and you can understand why the moderator flagged the account. Yet the result was going through that poster's history and restoring thousands of posts manually. A solution like this would have to log what was deleted or hidden by that "flag as spammer" button press. What if your hypothetical moderator marked a member as a spammer that had thousands of posts, and some of those thousands of posts had been previously deleted or hidden for violating the rules? If unflagging them restored all their posts, including the rule violating ones, that wouldn't work well at all. Keep preaching the good ideas though. You're speaking with a voice of absolute sensibility. We should form a club and make t-shirts. Edited September 4, 2020 by Paul E. Story time.
Ocean West Posted September 4, 2020 Posted September 4, 2020 agreed it's not a single thing here its multiple things The Flag As Spam feature needs restrictions to eliminate the need for: storing of what was hidden/deleted and where - should a restore be needed. a rolling deletion if not restored after a threshold has passed.
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