[Forum] Profile Pages of Banned Users

[acawley]

Am I correct in thinking that the User Profile Pages of permanently banned users lingers around?

How long do they stay? permanently?

Do you need to "delete" a user before their profile page disappears?

Thanks for your time and help.

[Mark.B]

The profile page will stay as long as the user exists. As an admin you can edit most of the details out of it so that it shows nothing of interest to anyone.

To remove it completely you'd need to delete the user.

[acawley]

Thanks for your time/help Mark.

The profile page will stay as long as the user exists.

This concerns me, when a user is banned permanently and lets say all of their posts are removed as they're a spammer, why does the user still need to "exist" in form where they still have a User Profile and other records? Surely would it not suffice to just keep merely a record of the banned user's username & IP address (to ensure they stay banned)?

As an admin you can edit most of the details out of it so that it shows nothing of interest to anyone.

I realise that and have utilised that helpful feature many times but it unfortunately doesn't help me in the scenario I'm facing currently in dealing with many spammers I have found.

To remove it completely you'd need to delete the user.

I like the sound of deleting the user but doesn't this in-effect remove the record of the banned username and IP address? Hopefully I'm wrong about that.

- - - Updated - - -

Just to fill you in on my scenario; I run quite an active forum for a non-commercial group sharing knowledge & skills freely, we successfully block 200-300 spam-registrations everyday, we get next to no spammers but I think I have found a few hundred spammer accounts that may have got in before some of our security features were in place.

I will need to learn how to remove users on mass or deal with batches, I'm currently not sure whether I should be permanently banning or deleting these users? Any further info or advice you can give would be greatly appreciated.

[Amaury]

I like the sound of deleting the user but doesn't this in-effect remove the record of the banned username and IP address? Hopefully I'm wrong about that.

Ban log, yes; IP address, no.

[Mark.B]

Ultimately the choice to just ban or delete is down to the individual admin.
What's described in my earlier post is how the software works, you are welcome to make an improvement request in the tracker but if I am honest I would doubt this will ever be changed in vB4 - the member profiles have worked like this going back through vB4, vB3, vB2 etc.

My advice is to delete spammers, often their usernames are the name of the product or site they are spamming, but as stated it's personal choice really.

[acawley]

My advice is to delete spammers, often their usernames are the name of the product or site they are spamming, but as stated it's personal choice really.

Thanks for your advice both.

Well in light of that really I think I will be banning & then deleting spam users as this sounds like the only way to eradicate the users presence entirely? Seems odd that it's a two stage process and one that doesn't lend itself well to doing on mass.

I'll perhaps have to look for plugins that will help me batch delete banned users.

Thanks again for your time.