Banned users showing as Active on "Search User" Admin Panel

Hi,

I'm one of several Admins for www.realitychatter.com. I've recently banned several new users (after activating them first) for various reasons. However, when I use the "Search User" function in the Admin Panel, and sort by "Joined" in "Descending" order, which puts the newest on top, these banned accounts all say "Yes" under the "Active" column. When I click on each user name individually, they do say they are banned. Shouldn't they say "Banned" on the search results page under "Active"?

Thanks in advance!

Try this:  AP > General > Forum > Configurartion
Scroll to the bottom and resyn the forum.

Thanks for your quick response. I followed your instructions and successfully resynchronized the forum, but when I go back to search users, as I described above, the banned ones still say "Yes" under "Active".

Any other thoughts? Again, thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Delete the forum's cookies and also clear your browser's cache.

I deleted the cache in Firefox, and deleted a cookie in Firefox for realitychatter, refreshed the search user page, but it still shows Yes.

How do I clear the forum's cookies? Thanks again!

If you have it activated, there is a link at the bottom of your homepage.

I don't see any such link on the bottom of the forum's homepage, or on the Admin Panel's home page.

Administration Panel > General > Forum > Configuration
Cookies deletion link:

On your forum, it is on the forum page.

I found the link (on the forum page, as you said). Clicked on it, confirmed yes, logged in again, but the banned users still say Yes under Active.

Thank you for all your suggestions. I appreciate you helping me with this.

I believe a ban account is still considered active.

Well, if I look at an individual who was banned, near the bottom of the page, the choices for "Active" are "Yes", "No", and "Banned". So the individual pages indicate that Active/Yes and Banned are different. Why would the search results be any different? This seems like a bug in the system to me.

I can confirm that is how it works on my forums, too.  I believe the active part deals only with members who have not activated their accounts if you have that options set, and/or if you change an account from active to not active.

Yes if a member's account is activated in any way (Admin, User, other) and then this member is banned by An admin or Mod of your forum it will still show as active as the account is still running in the background so when the member tries to log in it will say they are banned.

If you go in to there profile and deactivate the account then it's no longer in that setting and the member will then not see the ban Page as the account is no longer active.

To truly Ban a member you need to ban the IP address, Email address and the username,

My advice you is not to deactivate the account as it's one of our ways of keeping the member banned and telling that member there banned from your forum.

Hope that helps you in your problem.

APE

Thanks for the confirmation, SLGray, and for your and APE's explanations.

I understand what you are both saying, but it's not intuitive, is confusing, and to me is a design flaw that, coupled with another issue I reported last year, makes it very difficult to see accurate user information as a summary.

Please indulge me. As a former Software Quality Assurance Test Engineer/Manager, I'd like to explain why I think there are two issues with the forum that create problems for multiple Admin sites.

Background:
Our technical owner/founder rarely visits the site, so we Admins have to deal with all this. I'm probably one of the most technical Admins of the remaining 4 of us.

Our site is configured such that Admins have to approve new users. Some of our Admins approve new users without verifying the email addresses associated with the new user because they are not technical enough to know how to do that. I've been trying to go back through those accounts that were activated for bogus email addresses, and then ban them for it.

The associated issue is how the ban feature works. When the request for a new account comes in, it's inactive. This is a flag to all Admins that we have to either accept them or ban them (i.e., wating for us to deal with them). The problem that I reported last year is that if I take a new user not yet activated, and ban them directly without first activating them, the "reason for banning" does not stick and disappears from all screens. The only way I could get the reason to stick was to activate the user first, then ban.

So, based on your descriptions of how this works, it sounds like if I banned someone without first activating them, they wouldn't even show up on the "Search User" results, so I wouldn't have to weed them out. But then I lose the banned reason. We need "ban reasons" to inform others, so we have no choice but to activate first.

I also don't think of a Banned user as active, as they truly aren't, because they cannot log in and access the web site. I believe that by definition, Banned means no longer active, but I understand the system doesn't see it this way.

One problem I see with this is that there appear to be three transistions of activity level: from No, to Yes, to Banned. So your description means to me that it's only tracking the first transition, and doesn't update the status when reclassified as Banned. I see that as a bug.

So with multiple Admins, it's not easy to see what others have done (or even what I've done) without a lot of extra work. The Search User summary does not reflect banned, so if I start going through them and banning people, when I re-search, they all still say active, so I can't see which ones are banned. I have to go into each indivual one to see, or go to the Banned List (which is different that what I'm asking for here). Makes what should be an easy task very painful, tedious, and time-consuming.
So I feel caught between a rock and a hard place.

Banned users and inactive users are maintained in their own lists. The search Users function seems to assume they've already been activated (because the ones that aren't are in the Inactive List and don't show up here). So, they've all been activated to get on the list. If the Active column is what you said it is, all entries would always be Yes, so what's the point of the column?

What we need to see is a list of those that had been activated, with an easy way to see which of those have been banned. There doesn't seem to be a summary screen where we can see this. This is what I expected the Active column to indicate.

I can see two ways to address this issue. If the "banning reason" would stick by banning a user without activating them, then I think that would solve the problem, because the banned users wouldn't even appear on the list. Or, changed the Active column (or add another column) on the Search User results that flags those activated accounts which have been banned.

Is there any way that either of these proposed solutions could get on a list to be considered as future fixes/updates?

Thank you for your help and consideration of this matter.

By the way, I ban by username. I believe we have someone who is trying to register over and over again under different user names (a former banned member who is relentlessly trying to get back in). I can't ban by IP address, because they are trying to come in through proxy servers, which hide the real IP. A lot of the email addresses are bogus, so banning by email address is futile, because they are not real.

Can we consider this solved?

If you would like to suggest something for your forum, please start a poll here:  https://help.forumotion.com/f30-suggestions-for-your-forums .

Well, the issue isn't resolved, but you can close it out. Thanks.