8 replies to this topic

[BitMaster]

Why is it made impossible to view the posting history of a banned user? I can understand disabling some portions of a banned person's profile, but why even the latest Topics/Posts or simply the "Find Content" for that user? Apart from the humour side of things, there sometimes are quite relevant reasons to have a look at that history.
It's not even completely unrecoverable with sufficient Google-fu, but why force someone to jump through those hoops?

[jbadams]

We don't actually take any special action to prevent this, although in some cases the content that earned them a ban is something we have to remove for various reasons, so the majority of their content should be no harder to find than before the ban.

Do you have a specific example of a piece of content from a banned member that you had trouble accessing? I'd like to confirm the system isn't doing anything unexpected.

[BitMaster]

Well, as soon as a user is banned, their profile seems to be completely inaccessible. My normal method to find other content by a user would be to click on their name in the post header and then "Find Content" which would give me an overview of all topics the user participated in. But as soon a user is banned their name is grayed out and I do not know of another method to reach their profile (or the content they posted in).

[swiftcoder]

On the old software you could just paste their name in place of another member's profile URL, and that would work. Unfortunately, the new forum software requires you to add their ID# as well, which I don't think is easily accessible.

[Hodgman]

I didn't realise - us moderators can see their profiles, but if I log out, I get "Sorry, you don't have permission for that! This member is no longer active."

[BitMaster]

Well, Google can still retrieve the profile page. For example the most famous banned user right now is probably this one but as a normal user all I get is "Sorry, you don't have permission for that!". I can understand shutting down most of the profile, but (again) why the content they posted in?

Also, I don't remember ever having had any problems seeing the content of a banned user on the old page. I never needed any URL hackery there.

[FLeBlanc]

If you can find a thread started by the banned member in, say, your own history or the recent topics list, you can hover over their name in the thread-list and a pop-up will appear with a Find Content button that you can still click to get their content.

[Bacterius]

You can try and get google to list this member's posts (the ", on" part is to limit the results to actual posts and filter out metadata and other stuff):

site:gamedev.net "glhf, on"

Did not test for accuracy but it seems to do the job pretty well. FLeBlanc's solution is better though.

[swiftcoder]

You can try and get google to list this member's posts (the ", on" part is to limit the results to actual posts and filter out metadata and other stuff):

site:gamedev.net "glhf, on"

Did not test for accuracy but it seems to do the job pretty well. FLeBlanc's solution is better though.

This appears to catch only threads in which a post of the user's was quoted? The following seems more accurate:

site:gamedev.net "glhf Members"

Edit: well, mine does work, but perhaps only because the google cache gets stale. Eventually 'Members' will change to 'Banned', and then it might break...

Edited by swiftcoder, 13 December 2012 - 01:51 PM.