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Banned and deactivated users profiles sending E-Mail notifications

phreakphreak Vanilla*APP (White Label) & Vanilla*Skins Shop MVP

Hi all,

My banned or deactivated user profiles send E-Mail alerts to the these users e-mail addresses. As it is not very likely they will open it, webmail providers like Gmail and others start indicating them as spammy. With my boards having a lot of users - this could - have an impact on my domains internal rating on those webmail providers and makes it likely that more and more e-mail notifications, newsletters and transactional mails are landing in SPAM folders by default.

Does someone know an easy way to deactivate all e-mail alerts/notifications once a user is banned, set to guest or deactivated in other ways?
I don't want to support dead user profile zombie activities.

Thanx a lot,
phreak

  • VanillaAPP | iOS & Android App for Vanilla - White label app for Vanilla Forums OS
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Comments

  • vrijvlindervrijvlinder Papillon-Sauvage MVP

    Does someone know an easy way to deactivate all e-mail alerts/notifications once a user is banned?

    Yes , delete their content. You are getting notifications if people post on a comment or discussion of a banned person ? Best thing is to delete them and their content.

    Execute a MySQL delete query on the Banned User table's content.

  • RiverRiver MVP
    edited September 2016

    @phreak said:My banned or deactivated user profiles send E-Mail alerts to the these users e-mail addresses.

    not sure what deactivated means??? might be good not to change people to guest, delete them or ban them.

    you might clarify exactly what triggers the mailings you know occur: a mention, a post, a wall comment, ...

    look the check is already there, at least in activity.

    https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/blob/b040eea88be3d39467f13aab0e895ac98e4c2b88/applications/dashboard/models/class.activitymodel.php#L880

    • another option besides the one here: https://vanillaforums.org/discussion/comment/243138/#Comment_243138
      manually change the notifications preferences for banned users, if you are not deleting content. either en masse via code or as you ban them manually. coding would require a knowledge of how to set preferences while checking for banned. Banned will have 1 in the user table in Banned Column

    Pragmatism is all I have to offer. Avoiding the sidelines and providing centerline pro-tips.

  • phreakphreak Vanilla*APP (White Label) & Vanilla*Skins Shop MVP
    edited September 2016

    Thank you for your replies.

    Deleting the content is not really a solution as it will crack discussion meanings and google search ranking positions. If you make money with your forum, you should never do that.

    Thank you for the Github Link @River. I will check this out. Your link to a comment here leads to this discussion, so i guess this was not right.

    Manually changing the notifications preferences is undoable within 500 users. It's a big forum. If i can find the settings in the database i could apply it to all users with banned 1 via an sql query. Can someone lead me to the table fields which are used here? Ok.

    @Linc: Is this something you would look in as a functionality in future Vanilla versions. Some kind of "Deactivate User", which stops the login ability and all notifications?

    • VanillaAPP | iOS & Android App for Vanilla - White label app for Vanilla Forums OS
    • VanillaSkins | Plugins, Themes, Graphics and Custom Development for Vanilla
  • LincLinc Detroit Admin

    Pretty confused what's going on here. This appears 3 times in the activitymodel:

                // Only send if the user is not banned
                if (!val('Banned', $User)) {
                    $Email->send();
                }
    

    Banned users should never receive notifications. Verify the users are banned with the moderator option (not by placing them in a Banned role) and then narrow down what type of notification is slipping thru. Then file an issue on GitHub so it can be addressed.

    I've long considered a "Deactivate User" plugin but the concept is a bit more complicated than it seems on the surface.

  • LincLinc Detroit Admin
    edited September 2016

    Also note there is an "Email" permission that you can revoke from a role to prevent them from receiving any email. That is perhaps the easiest solution to "deactivate": just stick them in a restricted role.

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