Who are these forum users (the ones highlighted in yellow, below)?
They all have similar-looking user names, and they all were [I][B]banned[/B][/I] days or weeks ago.
And yet, from time to time, some of them continue to show up here as “logged in”. How is that possible?
If they’ve been killed off, how do they keep coming back? Are they zombies?
This screen-shot was taken shortly after 8pm New York time, Tuesday 2 July.
Hey Clint,
Get question. Zombies, almost. Even after a user is banned, they can still log into the website. Once in, they don’t see anything but a message that they’ve been banned. They can’t post, can’t chat, can’t engage in any of the member features or benefits. The way the forum software is designed, in most instances it’s better to ban a user than to delete a user so we can preserve the email, IP and post history for future use. It also prevents those same users from coming back to register again. If that happens, they get an error message before registration completes.
Strangely, the forum software still includes these banned members as “active” members. It’s by design. We’re working to get those names removed from the list, as it makes no sense to have them showing. As usual, thanks for your feedback!
Pipstradamus
No success yet, getting rid of these banned “numbered” accounts?
Screen-shot taken at 5:55pm New York time, July 11.
Apparently, the zombies have finally been re-buried — hopefully, for good this time.
And, something like 5,000 other Babypips “members” appear to have been purged from the membership rolls. Earlier this month, Babypips membership hit 200,000 and continued to climb for a couple of weeks, until suddenly it dropped back to 197,500, or thereabouts.
I guess hitting 200,000 was so much fun that Babypips wants to do it again.
Hey Clint,
Thanks for the question. We performed some user account cleanup for an ongoing back-end system upgrade currently taking place. All of these accounts were duplicates of some sort, some legitimate duplicates, where a user didn’t confirm his account and instead created a second account (or third or fourth or fifth), while the others were duplicates that were missed when we initially disabled the ability to create multiple verified accounts on the same email address (most of these accounts had zero activity and posts).
We combined some accounts and deleted the rest.
The back-end system upgrade will combine the comments system found on our Blogs with the Forums user registration system. So members will have one account to user both systems, rather than needing a Disqus account to make comments. The system upgrade should also help with site-wide speed and page load times, and it will help us better manage the different pieces of software that we use across the entire website, in turn helping to protect all of our users from security threats.
Let me know if you have any questions, and as always, thanks for the feedback.
Pipstradamus