Allow new member's email addresses to be visible to the admin

I come with this suggestion within about an hour or so after seeing a new user privacy feature has been implemented on my forum where parts of user's email addresses are now replaced with "xxxxx".

The suggestion is: to allow at least a week after registration were the administrator is allowed to see the full email address of the new user.

Over the past few days, my forum has been getting hit with a flood of new spam accounts (perhaps the worst in years). 16 new spam accounts created in just one day alone. Stopping these new accounts every few hours throughout the day (and waking up to a bunch of spam messages sent at ~4am in the morning). Shortly before coming on here to suggest this, I had to log in and ban one of those accounts that was just created and began to post more spam. Within the past few days, I've been able to stop nearly half of these new accounts before any spam posts could be made thanks to searching their email address on www.stopforumspam.com. The usernames they use are normally not useful alone as they are not always exactly the same as those listed on that site, while the email addresses are. I will not ban a new (0 post) account unless I have a match to the email address used.

Other than to stop spam, on occasion, I have a new user contact me through a contact page informing me that they did not receive the confirmation email when they joined, only to find that they transposed a character or is missing a character in their email address. Therefore, I'm able to explain the issue and fix it (rather than assume the confirmation email landed in their spam box or a technical issue occurred and it wasn't sent.) Thus, that member will be able to receive email notifications, request a new password if lost, etc.

I understand the constant push for more privacy of all users, however it will limit the ability of admins/founders to help users and combat spam accounts. Which is why I suggest allowing at least a short time frame when new user's email addresses are available to the administrator, or if only the founder's account.

Change the way you accept new members. Make it where you have to approve them.

You should be able to see members' email addresses in the AP.

Thank you for the reply. I have thought about switching to approving members manually, at least for a short while.

This is what I see in the Admin Panel now. As of a few hours ago, all email addresses were visible. They have now been replaced with blocked out "previews" of the addresses.



All the members you see there are spam accounts, so I'm not exposing any "real" member's accounts in that screenshot.

I posted this in the suggestion forum versus in the problem/support forum as I assume this to be a new privacy feature (that just so happened to be implemented at a bad time for me, lol).

Hello

Due to some changes made in the European laws about the personal data protection regulations, this had to be done to all forums

If you want to ban an account go to
Admin panel...Users & Groups....Users..,Ban Control....Ban Email address... type in the username you want to ban and press search
the member's name will then be found and the email will be displayed

Thank you @skouliki, that will work fine. I must've missed that search function, unless it was recently added.

I had a feeling this was likely due to new regulations.

I have to thank the Forumotion staff for keeping everything up to date and compliant. I'm coming up on 14 great years of having a forum through Forumotion.