Hi
I have an individual who is spamming other users via PM.

Is it possible to 'switch off' individual users?

Or is it a board wide decision?

Thanks

Currently the trick is to set him as underage in his profile in the control panel, and that will disable his ability to use the private message feature.

I bet that's not in the Manual lol...

no but it's mentioned here a couple times

Cheers Rick, I'd never have thought of that.

Hmmm (Didn't find anything on a search) - I s'pose you'd have to be a real Carpal Tunnel kind of postaholic to have noticed if it were posted anywhere

:looks around: I don't know who you're talking about...

In UBB classic, you could just go to the member's profile and turn off the ability to use private messaging.

For the life of me, I cannot see how this "Threads" is and improvement over Classic.

-- Hal

In Threads you can bann them for an Automated time
You cant in Classic.

Pros and cons all the way.

I prefer Threads and i used to be a Hardened Classic Guy

faster and more efficient, way more features, not EOL... It does take a LOT of getting used to however...

If this was a battle of quantity, your point could be valid. But why on earth were some very functional features of Classic omitted in Threads? Was it too much trouble to include these features? If new features are added that replaced the "old" features, that’s one thing. But it appears to me that somebody threw out part of the baby with the bath water.

You can make your ladder ten feet taller, but if you take out some some of the rungs in the middle, it may be less functional.

I'll do my volume shopping at Wal Mart.

-- Hal

KEep in mind that the features you've mentioned are not gone for good...

Threads release date was pushed back so many times that once they brought the product back from being ultimately vaporware...

Threads7 was completely rewritten from the ground up, so not all features from both products (or from feature requests) where (or rather could be) added in without pushing the release date back yet again which wasn't a possibility.

The new features that are being added are old ones that where in both products, as well as some new ones to play catchup with long awaited feature requests and other products that've had them for eon's.

Some sort of anti-spamming mechanism would be of great help to all us admins.

Rick probably knows best what's feasible from a programmer's perspective and what's not, but here are a few ideas on how admins could be helped by such a feature:

- few posts, many PMs: such users will be flagged in the control panel allowing the admin to check them out. There could also be an auto-block feature, so if a new user with 0 posts sends more than 5 PMs, he account is automatically blocked with an alert sent to the admin.

- cut&paste spammers: I would bet that 99% of all PM spammers simply cut&paste the message each and every time. If the software detects that the last 3 outgoing PMs are identical, it automatically locks the account pending further investigation. This solution alone would solve the PM spam issue for most admins.

- only allowing users registered X days/months ago and/or having posted X messages to use the PM feature. This alone would prevent newbie spammer registrations from being a threat. The admin would have the ability to set a benchmark for users before they get the PM feature, for instance being registered for a minimum of 30 days and having at least 100 posts.

Hi Conrad,
Looks like you've already been through what I'm going through now!

few posts - many pms!
cut & paste spamming!

You've posted some good ideas there.