Part 2 - Thursday June 1st


Infraction System
The infraction system allows you and your moderators to flexibly reprimand problem users. Create as many types of infractions as you want to represent any type of rules violation on your board. Each infraction has a controllable weight (points) and an option to allow it to be applied only as a warning, which alerts the user to their violation but doesn’t give them any points. Additionally, the points given to a user for a violation can be automatically removed after a specified amount of time via the Scheduled Tasks system.

The points are used to remove permissions from users that reach specific thresholds. To be more flexible, the existing user group permission system is used. You can see in the screenshot that “Registered Users” who have more than 15 points will have permissions from the “Infractions – Moderate All Posts” group applied, and any user with more than 30 points will get permissions from the “Infractions – Banned” group.



When an administrator or moderator wishes to apply an infraction to a user, he or she clicks the infraction icon on a post, and is presented with a choice of infractions and an option to send a private message to the user with more information. It is not a problem if a user has disabled private messages but that is a feature for another day. If private messages are disabled globally and email is available, an email will be sent to the user instead.



A user may also be given an infraction from their profile. The profile is also where a user's infraction history can be seen. Active infractions may also be reversed by users with appropriate permissions.



Infractions are implemented as a user group permission (not a moderator permission) so you can also allow any of your users to give infractions if you desire. A hierarchical system is used such that:
  1. Administrators can not be given infractions
  2. Super Moderators can only be given infractions by Administrators
  3. Moderators can only be given infractions by Administrators and Super Moderators
A thread can automatically be posted in a specific forum when an infraction is given, allowing discussion of the violation to take place.



In addition to receiving a PM about an infraction/warning, users are alerted to new infractions in their User control panel.



Default Thread Sorting Option per Forum
You may now choose how threads will be sorted on a per forum basis. Options include the field and direction to sort using.





New Buddy/Ignore List Editor
The new buddy and ignore list editor allows users to be quickly added and removed from your lists, with AJAX-based assistance for name suggestion along the way. If an error occurs such as a user not being found, you can simply correct the error and continue without reloading the page.





Rate Threads with AJAX
Rating a thread can be done without a page reload now. Rate a thread like you normally would, but when you submit the rating, you’ll get a notification that your rating was accepted (or if it wasn’t) and the new thread rating will instantly appear.



IP Resolution in Who’s Online with AJAX
Resolving an IP (like 123.123.123.123) to a hostname (like myhostname.vbulletin.com) can take a long time. If you have selected the option to resolve IPs to hostnames on Who’s Online, you’ve probably noticed a delay in the page loading if your board is busy. Now, you can get the speed of only showing IPs with the human readability of hostnames. When any IP address is clicked on Who’s Online, it is resolved to a hostname without a page reload via AJAX.



Improved Proxy Support in Session Handling
In previous versions of vBulletin, you needed to keep the same IP address from page-to-page in order to maintain a session. While this is very good for security, it causes significant problems for users behind a proxy, such as AOL users. vBulletin 3.6 provides an option that allows you to control how much of the IP address must match for a previous session to be maintained. This should help eliminate many of the problems users have with staying logged in.



More AJAX Username Auto-Completion
Username auto-completion via AJAX is now performed when editing the buddy/ignore lists, searching the member list, and entering a referrer during registration.



Paid Subscription Permissions
You may now control what user groups can purchase specific paid subscriptions.



Show Threads or Posts from Quick Search Popup
You can now choose to show search results as threads or posts without having to click through to the advanced search page.



Phrase Types Identified By Field Name Only
This is something that will no doubt interest those of you who modify vBulletin. The phrasetypeid column in the phrasetype table has been removed. Phrase types are now uniquely identified by the fieldname.



LastPostID column in User, Thread, and Forum Tables
The ID of the last post made by a user, in a thread, or in a forum is now stored directly in the appropriate table. Additionally, the tables created for Tachy users (globally ignored users) include these new fields. This acts as an optimization for several functions and eliminates several bugs that were otherwise unfixable.