Skip to main content

Hi inSided community! 👋

I’m interested in exploring more Banned User capabilities in inSided. Here’s the run down 

Today, inSided provides settings for “Ban User” and “Erase User” – when you Ban a user, they will not be able to log into your community, BUT they will still receive email notifications about any PMs they get, and they will see when people interact with one of their old posts.

Here’s a (totally fake and extreme) example: 
Craig has been a consistent contributor of our community for several months, even PMing other members to share his great advice. Suddenly, Craig has some life changing events and now is really rude, easily angered, and borderline racist. His comments progressively gets meaner, and he’s not nice to other members of the community. After several warnings and suspension notices for violating community terms, we ultimately make the call to Ban Craig. 

While banned from the community, Craig still receives notifications about topic replies and PMs, but can’t do anything, because he’s banned. As a solution, we manually edit his account email to a fake one. 

But now someone that he was having a great PM conversation with has messaged Craig a bunch, and its just radio silence. This member doesn’t know that Craig has been banned for racist comments, so it just feels like they’re being ignored. 

Additionally, Craig’s topic replies and profile still shows up in posts, so someone might “@craig”  to respond, but they’ll never get an answer because Craig is still banned. 

If we Erase the user altogether, it will show up as anonymous, but it’s not a really great user experience and what if Craig decides he suddenly doesn’t want to be a racist jerk anymore? 

I know this is a VERY EXTREME and rather unlikely scenario, but just want to put that out there that at least parts of this experience could be made easier. 

 

Updated idea statusNew→Open

I don’t think my experience here is the same scenario that was provided in the original post, but rather the general Banned User experience. I did some testing and it looks like currently if you ban a user: 

  • ✅ The user is no longer able to log into the community. 
  • ✅ The user’s posts still show as from that user (versus being changed to anonymous or a blank user). 

However, what is missing is: 

  • ❌ Other community members can still send a DM to the banned user. This leads to a bad experience if that person never responds (especially if the user was an employee who left the company). 
  • ❌ The banned user can still be tagged in posts. Then no one gets notified since that user is no longer active.
  • ❌ Community members can still reply to a post made by a banned user, but then no one is notified of the reply. 

I think there are a few operational details that need to be thought through for banned users. 

 

As a bit more context to my situation, I’m thinking about the SOP when either employees leave the company or community members leave their companies and won’t be logging in anymore using their existing login. Rather than deleting the user, which leaves all of their posts as “anonymous”, banning them seems like the best option to retain their names and profiles associated with their posts. However, it leaves a gap for moderation and responding to community members if they are still interacting with the user. 

@tiffany.oda I am thinking about this for my community, similar to you. We are implementing a private community and if/when an employee leaves or an active member is no longer my client, I need to deactive them but want to keep their valuable content. I have been testing the use of a ‘banned user’ rank that would change the way their name appears in their profile (italics or a gray color) and applying a rank that displays “Former Member.” It still doesn’t solve for the emails being sent or the ability to send PMs but I am hoping the visual indicators will prevent or slow down other members from wanting to send the banned user a PM or @ tagging them.

I’m gonna back this as well. We got hit with a nasty spam attack recently which our users flagged up and were concerned about the related scam.

Having this functionality would shut this type of abuse down and make life easier for both myself and @timcavey .

@BPLightlog might also be interested in this.

The other thing I’d add is that having the option to permanently erase ALL PM threads when issuing a ban against a user would definitely help all of the use cases in this particular Idea.

That way, if it’s a PM Spammer, you can ban them, wipe their spam out and block their return without doing a full erase. And just like in the Craig example, whether or not “Craig” were to come back under a fresh start rule, his PM inbox can be flushed out to get rid of the undesirable behaviour in the meantime to remove the unpleasantries that he left behind.

HI @BPLightlog!!!

 

Quick check, if a forum user is erased, are all of their PMs removed?

They are indeed. The PM Spam was removed from my inbox roughly 24 hours after you hit the erase user button.

Terms & ConditionsCookie settingsAccessibility statement