User bans by non-existent user "N/A"?

[RobFerrari]

Hmm, just the past day there have been a couple perm user bans and they’re listed as “N/A” for who banned them. None of our mods have done this. So it has to be some system auto banning feature or there is a bug someone is exploiting. I have some suspicion it is malicious, because both users were from the UK. Any ideas the root cause?

Thanks,
rob

[Steve Machol]

Do you have any hacks, add-ons or plugins installed. Do you have a promotion that bans users?

[RobFerrari]

Do you have any hacks, add-ons or plugins installed. Do you have a promotion that bans users?

Have Sigmachat, but I doubt that is related. No other related hacks. No promotions related to bans.

There is something in the vB code that is populating "N/A". Can someone find where that is?

I'm going to ask the users that were banned if they know anything.

[Steve Machol]

I'm not aware of anything that would do this except for a promotion.

[Scott MacVicar]

N/A happens when there is no userid associated with the ban, if that helps.

Any moderators been delated recently?

Try looking at the Control Panel log to see who accessed userban

[RobFerrari]

Any moderators been delated recently?

Try looking at the Control Panel log to see who accessed userban

With several thousand entries in CP ban log, only 3 with a user of N/A and they were 2 years ago and no ban of an actual user. Those could have been a past mod that is no longer a user. No recent mods have been deleted.

Nothing displayed in log for when this happened over the weekend.

I suspect something with the users, because they're both from the UK and there have been problems in the past. I asked them if they knew anything and they haven't responded. Do you know anything user initiated where they could ban themselves and the mod would be listed as "N/A"?

[Scott MacVicar]

You could check the userban table and see what ID it has for adminid, this is where we obtain the information from and there is no way for a user to automatically ban themselves.

Though n_a is used when there is no match from the user table, the only other way it could have occured is a modification that automatically did this like a warning system or a moderator who has been merged accounts or been deleted.

[RobFerrari]

I just had this happen again and with more analysis might have found the root cause conditions to cause this. Let me know if it rings any bells.

The user just received a systematic ban (no user/admin/mod initiated) and the "banned by" in the ban table shows as "NA".

The user had a paid subscription that expired July 7th when this happened. Users are supposed to go back to the Non Subscribed group when subscription expires. The user signed up for their year subscription June 30th of last year. 7 days were manually added by me at some point in the last year after they had a temp ban. I always do this to banned users so they don't pay for time they were banned.

So it appears without more analysis that when a user is subscribed, gets temp ban, ban ends goes back to subscribed group, and time is manually added to the subscription that when it expires, the user goes back to the banned group instead of non-subscribed.

Does this seem plausible?

[Scott MacVicar]

Nope since we dont add time to a users subscriptions and once they were moved back after the temp ban it shoud have returned them to the main group. It is possible this is a bug so i'll look in a moment.

[Jinovich]

I sometimes get the same "banned by: N/A" on my forums sometimes and we also are using a paid subscription system where members are moved around from usergroups.

I am not sure whether this fixed our problem but what we did was we changed the usergroup change settings after a paid subscription to enable the "VIP Usergroup" as a secondary usergroup with usertitle and html markup override enabled and kept the primary usergroup as the default "Registered User".

So when a user buys our Vip plan their usergroup changes from:
Prim Usergroup: Registered Member

to
Prim Usergroup: Registered Member
2ndry Usergroup: Vip Member

ever since then we have never had a problem with "N/a"'s

But still thats a work around we shouldnt have to perform so maybe it is a bug.

[RobFerrari]

So when a user buys our Vip plan their usergroup changes from:
Prim Usergroup: Registered Member

to
Prim Usergroup: Registered Member
2ndry Usergroup: Vip Member

ever since then we have never had a problem with "N/a"'s

But still thats a work around we shouldnt have to perform so maybe it is a bug.

Hmm, we don't use the secondary groups like that, we're moving the Primary from Registered (Not Subscribed) to Subscribed. Tens of thousands of users, thousands that are subscribed, and hundreds that have been banned the 5 users that have had this happen over a year were all subscribed users that got banned and I added their ban time to subscription as they came back from banned to subscribed group. Its like vB is thinking banned was the previous primary group when the subscription ends. However, it is putting an entry in the banned log with "NA". Not for sure, but I think if you just change a users primary group to banned it doesn't add anything to the log.

[Jinovich]

Sounds very much plausible I spose the only way to see if its correct is to simulate that on a shorter time scale.

Thing is with our suscribed users that we ban we dont add on additional days, for the days they were banned for.

So I unless vB is confusing itself with some previous ban the member was issued and fufilled a long time ago I dont understand why it would auto ban them if or when their subscription expires.