Application which allows you to apply random 'annoyances' to your annoying users. Options are:

• Show a blank page
• Show site as offline
• Show page not found error
• Delay page loading
• Redirect to another url

Each of the above has a % chance of happening, configured by you - and you can configure different behaviour on a per-user basis.

Edited January 19, 20214 yr by Nathan Explosion

Could this be explored into a game situation? Say you have a custom message with a count down and that you must quickly post within 1 minute? Or maybe answering a question, etc.

20 hours ago, Dean_ said:

Could this be explored into a game situation? Say you have a custom message with a count down and that you must quickly post within 1 minute? Or maybe answering a question, etc.

I'm not following you on this one, at all.

What's new in v1.0.1

• NEW: Ability to target user or a group
• NEW: Addition of a tracker to monitor what actions have been taken for targeted users, if chosen to be tracked
• NEW: Settings to handle deletion of tracking content on user account deletion/merge actions

What's coming in v1.0.2

• NEW: addition of functionality to prone old entries in the tracker, via Tasks
• NEW: addition of a delete action for entries in the tracker
• NEW: added setting to allow choice of targeting 'Primary' group membership or 'Secondary' group membership
• CHANGE: minor language modifications to correct some visual issues

 

Edited January 20, 20214 yr by Nathan Explosion

What's new/fixed/changed in v1.0.2

• NEW: addition of functionality to prune old entries in the tracker, via Tasks
• NEW: addition of a delete action for individual entries in the tracker
• NEW: added setting to allow choice of targeting 'Primary' group membership or 'Secondary' group membership
• FIX/CHANGE: minor language modifications to correct some visual issues

Hi, in addition to the glitch which I have already reported to – which for the benefit of others was caused by my inadvertent deletion of a configured group, I then tried disabling the application and re-enabling it – but it was still hanging and giving me the error messages.

Once again, for the benefit of anybody who reads this, I found a glitch which was caused by my own carelessness – and that I configured group and then deleted the group without removing it from the annoyed user database.

 

Just now, BankFodder said:

I then tried disabling the application and re-enabling it – but it was still hanging and giving me the error messages.

Which it will continue to do until I work around what you found - if you want to fix it yourself, go to neappuserannoyance_listing in your database, and delete the entry which has the 'ua_group_id' value that matches up to the id of the deleted group (see the error you are getting - it has the id in it -> IPS\Patterns\_ActiveRecord::load(9)

Thanks for the quick response. Actually I uninstalled it and then reinstalled it and everything is sorted. A very quick fix – although I'm a bit worried that if I had had a stack of users configured in, whether I might have lost all of that and had to start again.

I hope that these kinds of accidents can help to refine unforeseen problems.

1 minute ago, BankFodder said:

although I'm a bit worried that if I had had a stack of users configured in, whether I might have lost all of that and had to start again.

Yes, you would have lost your configured users.

So I had better be more careful in future. A good learning curve and lucky that it happened right at the beginning.

I'm afraid that I wouldn't know how to access the link you gave and I suppose I'd have to ask our Webmaster

Lol this is so extra I'm low-key living for it. 

5 hours ago, BankFodder said:

So I had better be more careful in future. A good learning curve and lucky that it happened right at the beginning.

I'm afraid that I wouldn't know how to access the link you gave and I suppose I'd have to ask our Webmaster

No worries - people have to 'do stuff' for issues like this to be found.

Already got something in to overcome the error display in v1.0.3

Edited January 20, 20214 yr by Nathan Explosion

v1.0.3 is currently pending approval:

FIX: User/Group listing no longer displays an error after a user group has been deleted in the ACP
CHANGE: Minor language string updates

Any ideas on additional 'annoyances' that can be added for the next version?

For example (and I'm trying to figure out a way to allow a free value to be added...a 1 degree skew looks fun):

Edited January 30, 20213 yr by Nathan Explosion

You are obviously a vindictive B'stard - I like that!

However, I think that part of the annoyance is to do it in a way that the troublemaker isn't aware that they are being affected by some deliberate mechanism on the forum.

I think skewed images would be very funny – but I think it would be pushing it a bit and if they were really out for trouble, they'd very quickly register a new username so it would be a constant chase – which can be pretty tiring and time-consuming if you are running a busy forum.

I really think the outstanding feature of your routine is the fact that you can assign a whole group – but also make that group secondary so that the annoyed user is not aware. In that way they will be prompted to take some action such as registering a new user ID.
I think any other annoyances have to be pretty stealthy



 

How about a forum screen which simply says that the forum is temporarily off-line? That might be useful for a while.

You don't have to use the settings if you don't want to 😉

Ability to turn the site off-line is already there, so please elaborate on your 'forum is temporarily off-line' suggestion.

Thanks. Yes I realise what the settings and that it would be necessary to use it.

I just suddenly thought that there might be a message plastered across the forum – which says something like "sorry, the XXX forum is temporarily off-line. We will try to re-establish it as quickly as possible" – in fact it would be a good feature if people could come up with their own messages.

So are you suggesting that if the user accesses a specific forum out of your list of forums then they may or may not see a message?

No not a specific sub- forum. If they tried to visit the forum, then instead of being diverted to a different URL or a delay in accessing the page et cetera, they would simply have a large message across the forum saying that the form was off-line – for whatever reason – and they then wouldn't be able to proceed to do anything else. The forum would effectively be locked against them – it would be inactive

So the site off-line? Already there.

If you are requesting something different then what is the difference between that and your suggestion?

Edited January 30, 20213 yr by Nathan Explosion

I think he's suggesting that the site isn't actually offline but it will appear to be for an affected user. Whilst everyone else is using the site, the unlucky user will occasionally see an offline screen as though the site were genuinely unavailable. It would be offline for him only at that particular time.

Which is currently possible.

Maybe I better have a closer look at the whole thing because clearly there are some features which I've missed

3 hours ago, BankFodder said:

Maybe I better have a closer look at the whole thing because clearly there are some features which I've missed

😄

I'm adding to that functionality in the next version too:

Edited February 1, 20213 yr by Nathan Explosion

v1.0.5 is currently awaiting approval (no v1.0.4, by the way)

• FIX: Fixed possible error when manually deleting individual entries in the User/Group listing
• FIX: Fixed possible error when manually deleting individual entries in the Tracker
• NEW: Addition of ability to display custom messages to users when the action is to show the site as offline
• NEW: Addition of a new annoyance - rotate the screen by a number of degrees