by CuriousPortlander March 9th 2016, 7:53 pm
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 I believe that by definition, Banned means no longer active, but I understand the system doesn't see it this way.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.