MyBB Community Forums

The "hellban" plugin is a small step in the right direction as it allows you to "ghost" a user to the rest of your forum community. Anything the user posts is invisible, but the user doesn't know it because THEY will see their own posts.

I'd love to see this type of idea expanded on in 2.0.

1) Ghost/Hellban an IP address or IP range
This means that if you know a spammer is always coming in from the same IP or IP range, you can ghost him and he won't even know it. HE will see his own posts and everything, but anything he posts (or sends privately) does NOT get seen by anybody else on the boards. Basically it keeps the person hellbanned whether they're logged into their account or not, because otherwise, it would be very easy to figure out you're hellbanned.

2) Ghost/Hellban viewing privileges spread to ALL users from the IP of the hellbanned user, so NONE of them realize the user is hellbanned.
Basically if you put a hellban on "Sarah" and she's living with "Tom" then we want "Tom" to have NO IDEA that Sarah got hellbanned. Since Tom is on the same IP as Sarah, then Tom SHOULD see all of Sarah's posts even though nobody else on the forum can see them.

3) Manually link viewing permissions to specific accounts.
If we know for a fact that "Jim" is romantically involved with "Suzy" and we have to hellban Suzy, then we already know that we're going to want to extend the "trick" to Jim's account so Jim doesn't realize that Suzy got hellbanned. This will accomplish the same thing as step #2 above, but manually, because Suzy and Jim have a different IP.

4) User Agent detection and crosschecking with recently banned individuals' user agents.
As we all know, a user agent isn't as "specific" as an actual fingerprint would be, but it does help give us a clue as to who is who. I'd like a feature where, if I perform a ban to a user, then I automatically get a "quiet" entry in a log of people who have created accounts with this exact combination: (from an IP never used in our system before, plus matches the user agent of a banned party from the last 3 hours, plus came to our site from a directly typed URL rather than by clicking a link from somewhere)
So basically if that formula matches a NEW signup, I have that person's name on a "possible risk" list. That right there will give me the heads up I need in order to perform some manual searches on this user's info and quickly figure out if they're legitimate.

4b) If a "flash cookie" can also be stored on a users system and then checked later on (and used to verify that it's the same user as before) then that also should be implemented to what I'm describing in step 4 above.


Sum up...

It's all about tricking the person who is violating your rules, AND keeping it difficult for them to "check" if they've been ghosted to the public. Their fellow spy accounts and friends NEED to also be "fooled" which can be done with a combination of automated and manual actions like those above.

I have more ideas that can expand on this type of thing further.

Old idea and imho it's trivial and ineffective for spam. Might be good against banning troublesome members but that's it.

Well yes that's a big part of it is that there are trolls and vultures in addition to spammers and such. Some forums have a lot more issues with "real people" being a-holes as opposed to automated bots and such.

I feel the tactics above would actually help in both regards.

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There. I changed the title to say "anti-abuse" instead of just "anti-spam"...

I doubt you'll be seeing this in any version of MyBB. We want to encourage conversation and user activity, not make members feel like they're being ignored. If you're having issues with a member, using the warning system or even the banning system.

No I'm referring to people in more of a "gaming" community who are, for lack of a better work, a bit immature and absolutely are of no use to "warn" or anything.

The whole point is to have a safeguard in place for those troublemakers who the standard approach doesn't work on.

I'm talking about reducing the Admin's headache once a user has made it known for a fact that warnings and regular bans WON'T stop them. Once that happens, it's time to start making their life a little harder by ghosting them as much as possible. It's a pretty effective strategy on some major websites.

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(2013-01-12, 12:59 PM)Nathan Malcolm Wrote: [ -> ]I doubt you'll be seeing this in any version of MyBB. We want to encourage conversation and user activity, not make members feel like they're being ignored.

That's just it...

They should NOT feel ignored because they shouldn't know it's happening. That's why this works. To the user, all their posts DO show up and everything appears fine.

It's a tactic to slowdown the process of abusing a forum, because the "abuse" is all hidden even though the user thinks it's working. The fact that they would need to jump through extra hoops just to even "know" if they were being ignored, will in itself discourage the abusive person.

Lastly - this is the type of thing that would be a LAST resort. It would be rarely used BECAUSE you don't want it well-known that your forum can do this. That's how I'd treat it anyway.

If you thought I meant this should be the standard banning system that is used on every user, I apologize, because that's very far from what I'm saying.

(2013-01-12, 01:05 PM)CheckingThis Wrote: [ -> ]No I'm referring to people in more of a "gaming" community who are, for lack of a better work, a bit immature and absolutely are of no use to "warn" or anything.

We have members like that here, but they end up getting banned. If such a feature was core it would be obvious when it was used on their account because it would be possible on every installation. Such a feature is meant to be discrete, not something every member is aware of.

It's not something which we want to promote. If you have troublesome members and don't want to discipline them, by all means go ahead and install the plugin. It's not a must have feature of a forum. It's only required for specific types of forums with specific types of administrators.

Though I agree that such things as Coventry and Hellban do seem like the last resort for "admins who have lost control of their forum" I think that times are changing.

There ARE users who are only there to troll and waste the admin's time on making sure that one bad apple does not sour the barrel for everyone, and these kind of users are becoming more common.

I would say that this feature - as of this moment in time - is not really required in the core - though it might make a very handy plugin.

(2013-01-12, 01:34 PM)Leefish Wrote: [ -> ]Though I agree that such things as Coventry and Hellban do seem like the last resort for "admins who have lost control of their forum" I think that times are changing.

There ARE users who are only there to troll and waste the admin's time on making sure that one bad apple does not sour the barrel for everyone, and these kind of users are becoming more common.

Precisely...

Believe me I know how to keep my forum under control and I'm no stranger to admin practices. I've been involved with fighting online abuse in other avenues and I've seen what kinds of tactics work against different types of abusive individuals. I have seen what's more likely to work against a typical scammer and I've seen what discourages a "troll" from wanting to continue their harassment.

I run an online roleplaying federation where people sign up with made up characers and they compete against each other with their writing/stories/etc... Unfortunately, sometimes people in this type of site become massive trolls who just want to ruin the forum. They aren't necessarily very tech savvy or clever... but very annoying and can cause legit members to quit because they're so tired of seeing the Troll posts, etc.

I'm not talking about having lost control... I'm talking about maintaining control in the most seamless and "quiet" way possible so that my normal users don't even realize it's happening.

I actually requested in the plugins area that somebody modify the existing Hellban plugin to do the things I listed in my original post. Is there a way to make that request more "official" or "noticed" then? If I recall, it was ignored. Once a plugin request is lost in the shuffle, does that mean we've reached the end of the road and the request can't happen? What's the next step? Offering to pay somebody? (and if so; where?)

Thanks for the insight.

@CheckingThis - I do agree with you, and I was not intending to imply that you had lost control (hence the quotation marks), more that like many of us instead of following trolls about you would rather spend your time building your community and keeping a well run forum for your members to enjoy.

Re the plugin - what you could do is contact the plugin creator or a developer (I know Paul H has a nice plugin called miserable member) and ask them for a quote on these changes.

Yeah I was just backing even further what you had said. I knew you weren't directly implying anything negative. Kind of like quoting you to agree but then continuing to make my case for Nathan/others who might be looking on.

Thanks for the suggestion - I'll look into that plugin as I've never heard of it before.