User ban via Filter

[ada_wgoodman]

Hey there everyone,

My organization installed a keyword-based filter last year in an attempt to tackle a large spam issue we had. Recently, we had a user contact us saying that he'd been banned - turns out that part of his email address included the phrase we based the filter around. Has anyone encountered this issue before? How did you solve it?

[BrianOblinger]

As far as I know, the filter functionality does not include the ability to ban a user based on a filter match. At most it would prevent a user from entering terms found in the filter.

Is the user in question actually banned or was there an access issue that they mistook for being banned? You can check in Admin > Mod Tools > User Bans.

[ada_wgoodman]

I believe he's actually banned. And searching for his username actually shows no results. See attached.

[BrianOblinger]

If he isn't in the ban list there and you don't see a message about the account being banned when you visit their profile page then they aren't banned. Sounds like there is some other access issue occurring.

[annabakerADA]

The issue here is: If we implement a broad user ban (in this case, a keyword as part of an email address), and a legitimate user gets caught in that ban, is there a way to un-ban him alone without undoing the original ban?

Thanks!

Anna

[BrianOblinger]

Unfortunately not. You'll have to adjust the configuration of the ban that is causing innocent users to be caught in the ban.

[JillianB]

We ran into this as well earlier this year. We had a lot of users registering with a very specific word in the domain of their e-mail, so we thought it would be safe to ban based on that. It turned out it wasn't as specific as we thought and we had to reverse the ban. Conveniently it was right around the same time the spammers caught on and dropped using that domain, so our strategy needed changing anyways.

[annabakerADA]

Very similar to our situation. We reversed the ban and crossed our fingers. Thanks!