The Special Hells: Bringing a Knife to a Flamewar

The worst thing you can ever do is personally piss off a community manager. Maybe your account is permabanned, or you’re given a temp ban from the forums. But if you’ve been riding the line – if the CM can’t quite justify banning you, but you’ve genuinely made an enemy of them – if they have to get creative to deal with you?

Then, my friend, welcome to the special hells.

(Note: This is going to be a list of vBulletin-focused techniques for dealing with problem players. I haven’t worked with other forum backends, but there may be ways to replicate the effects. Also, our version of vBulletin is very customized, so there may be differences from your own versions.)

Important links:

Forums and Moderators -> Forum Permissions

Usergroups -> Usergroup Manager

Tachy Goes to Coventry

This is the classic, the battle-hardened veteran of dealing with spammers and alt accounts alike. When banning someone would just get them to make a new account – whether the user is spamming, or just angry enough to keep registering new free accounts – Tachy is the answer. By adding them to the Tachy list, they’re added to everyone’s Ignore lists.

From the player’s perspective, they’re still posting threads, still replying, etc. All anyone else will see, though, is “The admins decided that X should be quiet for a while.” This applies to their old posts as well, which is a mixed blessing.

If you want, you can remove them from Coventry after they’ve calmed down, but unlike banning them, they’ve lost time to figuring out what happened. It takes a surprisingly long time for them to realize this, often a couple days.

(Fun fact: Facebook uses a version of Coventry in comment moderation. If you Hide a comment, at least in the Page framework, it can still be seen by them and their friends.)

Change the title of the Banned usergroup

For vBulletin, the way banning someone works is that it switches their usergroup to a usergroup with the Banned characteristic. First off, that means you can make more Banned usergroups with different permissions, allowing you to create different degrees of banning; second, since Banned is a usergroup, you can customize it. You can hide it.

Say you’ve got a popular user you need to temp-ban. If his friends see that he’s banned, they’ll rise up in revolt. Usually, the giveaway is the user title: While he’s banned, his title will say as much. You can open up the usergroup and hide that, though, changing the Banned group’s default title to be the same as their pre-ban title.

(If your Banned usergroup has other giveaways, like different avatar permissions, copy your main Registered Users group, and just scroll down and set it as a Banned group.)

“You can’t see the PvP forums? However could this have happened?!”

Some players are good and helpful through most of the forums, but when they get on one particular track, they turn into a Dire Ragemonster (challenge rating 7). Simple: Keep them out of that forum.

vBulletin lets you customize accessing and viewing forums according to their usergroup. This is the same tech that lets you make hidden Moderator Forums. Presto-changeo, now they can’t even see the discussion that was getting them riled up, or they can read it but not comment on it.

(This isn’t usually something that can be set player-by-player. You’ll probably want to set up a new usergroup that doesn’t have access to those forums.)

Changing permissions

This one’s less subtle, but it can give you a way to directly curb a bad behavior without having to ban someone. The ability to have a signature, and what can be included in it, is determined by the usergroup.

You can also change their image permissions, and how long their posts can be. This has to be altered per usergroup per forum, though, so it can take a while to set up usegroups with these permissions changed globally. Alternatively, if an entire board is a problem – generally PvP forums – change it so no usergroup can post images or gifs.­

The banhammer isn’t your only weapon, fellow CMs. Know your tools and get creative, because sometimes it’s a lot better to use something tricky than just banning them. Maybe you can give a player a second chance by only removing some permissions, or maybe you keep a spammer from realizing he’s effectively banned – either way, keep these subtle moves in mind.