PRUNE USERS - enhancements

[sooskriszta]

Prune users is a great function for fighting spam. It needs a little enhancement, though.

1. At the moment, to prune, you can search users by:
- username
- email
- join date
- last active date
- number of posts

This is clearly inadequate. In addition to the above, admin should be able to search users to prune by:
- website
- location
- time zone
- age
- ip
...basically all profile fields...

2. Also, when I submit the search to prune users, a search results/ confirmation page appears...on this page, I can confirm deletion of these users, and/or individually admin users....this is all good...but there is no exception handling, which is a problem...

Say on the prune users results page I see I want to delete all but one user. In the current implementation, I can't do that quickly. What should happen is that on the search results/confirmation page, there should be checkboxes next to each user (checked by default)...so that I can uncheck the exceptions before I hit confirmation to prune.

3. At the moment, prune users provides options to delete posts or not, and to either delete or deactivate pruned users....so far so good.

In addition to the above, it should also provide the option to ban by email, ban by IP and ban by username (these should be checkboxes and radio buttons)

[callumacrae]

Prune users isn't a spam prevention tool, and for this reason I don't think these features should be added.

[sooskriszta]

What is the purpose of the Prune users tool?

Also, if there is an should unintended benefit of a function, especially a big unintended benefit, then should it continue to be ignore in future development?

[A_Jelly_Doughnut]

(very similar) Feature is scheduled for 3.1.

viewtopic.php?f=84&t=32871

[sooskriszta]

Thanks JD! Sounds pretty much like what I am after.

[MartinTruckenbrodt]

Hello,
User pruning can not prevent spammers. But you can use it to remove most of successfully registered spammers from the user table (memberslist).

My problem with recent phpBB default feature is that administrators can do very bad thinks in stupid combinations of settings. Also these settings are not saved for the next use/task. IMO it would be better to have three or four default jobs predefined.
Also I think it would be very comfortable to have a fully automatically running user prune feature using this predefined settings.
I think there is a validated phpBB3 Olympus MOD doing it this way.
We are pruning posts automatically. Why not to prune users automatically? I think content is much more important then lost, inactive oder deactivated user accounts.

Bye Martin

[A_Jelly_Doughnut]

Also these settings are not saved for the next use/task. IMO it would be better to have three or four default jobs predefined.

This is an interesting point (one that I didn't comprehend in the previous dicsussion)

We are pruning posts automatically. Why not to prune users automatically? I think content is much more important then lost, inactive oder deactivated user accounts.

Most often, pruning old posts is done to save storage space -- and as such, very few boards use that feature.

[MartinTruckenbrodt]

Hello A_Jelly_Doughnut,
you know that I'm the ADAP MOD author. And you know that I think that (nearly) all of ADAP features are core features. You are always welcomed to communicate about features and experiences and my reasons for programming the features with me!

I'm quite sure that a lot of phpBB using webmasters would use auto user pruning. It's very usefull for old boards. I think a user database (members list) full of incative or lost users makes no sense. One small point: Pruned usernames can been reused for active users and new users.

BTW: A small bump: viewtopic.php?f=105&t=33621 - Please excuse!

Bye Martin