MyBB Community Forums

I'm not entirely sure what is going on but I have a very strange problem that just started occurring. I believe it is associated with Akismet due to the automatic banning that I didn't do. Two of the members of my forum got banned automaticaly by the Akismet system on the forum recently. The system must have thought they were spammers so it gave them a permanent ban. I lifted the ban but now they login and immediately after logging in they are redirected to a page that tells them

Quote:You do not have permission to access this page. This could be because of one of the following reasons:

1. Your account has either been suspended or you have been banned from accessing this resource.
2. You do not have permission to access this page. Are you trying to access administrative pages or a resource that you shouldn't be? Check in the forum rules that you are allowed to perform this action.
3. Your account may still be awaiting activation or moderation. (Resend Activation Code)

The activation code doesn't get sent if they click on the link. I even created another account with the similar name, merged the 2 accounts then renamed the newly merged account with the same account details as the old one and yet the system somehow still recognized it and continues to ban them.

The other thing I've noticed while trying to troubleshoot the problem is that I can no longer successfully create user accounts without getting the same problem. If I login to the admin backend and simply create a new user it allows me to create the user. However when I go to login as the newly created user I end up getting the same error message as I posted above. And just like the other users who were banned, if I click to have the activation code re-emailed to me nothing ever arrives.

Now you may think they email for the forum isn't working but you're wrong. If a new user signs up the activation email gets sent to them. They can click on it and activate their account and all is fine and dandy. So now the only way for new accounts to get created successfully is for someone to go through the actual registration process then click on the activation email to activate themselves.

I have noticed that if I add the affected members accounts to the administrators group they are able to login just fine. If I remove them from the admin group they can't login and continue to get the same error message as before.

Any ideas would be gratefully accepted.

The version of the forum is a new Upgrade to v.1.4.9. I was previously using v.1.4.6, then upgraded to v.1.4.8, then v.1.4.9 just the other day. However my members got banned before I upgraded to v.1.4.9. I was hoping that upgrading would fix the problem. In case the problem was related to Akismet I turned it off but they still couldn't login. I also thought, that since the administrators group was immuned to the problem that maybe adding the affected user accounts to a group that was ignored by Akismet that it would allow them to log in but no. Only if they are a member of the administrators group can they login.

Also, I don't know if it's relevant or not but I had a couple of users register accounts recently but didn't do anything. After finding out the IP Addresses originated from the Phillipines and the IP range were known to be associated with spammers I decided to ban those accounts and the IP Address range. I only noticed the new "strange" accounts because the forum is for a web based game called oGame. So it's not a forum that gets a lot of visitors. If someone signs up, it is because they are communicating with our group in the game. My concern is that I set up this forum for the game as a test run for another forum that I am going to be administrating so that I can work out any bugs in a non-professional scenario. So far everything was going well until this happened.

Thank you in advance for anyone that has any helpful ideas about how to solve this.

It may be a possibility that the upgrading made this problem.
Have you checked the user group permissions?

You are awesome!! Thank you, that did the trick. I had tried everything else but the group permissions. The oddity is there were 2 groups I created outside of what MyBB comes with yet only one of them was affected. I'm going to reactivate Akismet and keep an eye on things. Hopefully this won't happen again but at least now I'll know where to begin looking.

Thanks again

**EDIT**
I wanted to post, that the section in the group permissions that was affected was under "Forums & Posts". Everything on that page was unchecked which included the ability for the group to see the board.

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ok, I spoke too soon
Now there was another problem. The users can login and see the forum but when they click on any thread there is nothing there as if the threads were hidden. At least it was a step forward. I went back again and checked the group permissions for each thread and forum and had to re-apply all the permissions for that group. Does anyone know why this might have happened. Was this a result of the upgrade? If it was, why was only one group affected and not any others?

I'm not sure. Could be upgrading, as I said before, but that's highly unlikely since 1.4.9 is only a maintenance upgrade.

So you've got this problem solved? That's great!

(2009-10-20, 05:37 PM)aledTH Wrote: [ -> ]1.4.9 is only a maintenance security upgrade.

Anyway, for the permissions issue, make sure 'Can view threads within forum' is ticked, in the Edit Permissions or Set Permissions section.