XF 2.1 Best practice for implementing banner and permissions for "new users"?

[SFFNetwork]

In the face of increasing traffic and lower-quality user registrations, we want to have all "new" accounts assigned restricted permissions initially, as well as a prominent "New User" banner beneath their avatar. Once the new account meets criteria based on posts, post quality, and time since registration (all of these exist within promotions), we want these restrictions to be lifted automatically, and for the "New User" banner to be removed.

Although I am comfortable with group permissions and promotions as concepts, I am unsure of the best way to replicate this functionality and (especially) to remove a "New User" banner once a user has met our criteria for no longer being "new". How would you all go about implementing this idea?

Thanks!

 

[Paul B]

There are two ways of doing it.


Option 1
Disable banner stacking.

Set up the restrictions and banner in the Registered user group.

Create a new user group - e.g. Established, and ensure it has a higher display styling priority than the Registered user group.

Create a promotion for the Established user group based on your criteria.


Option 2
Create a new user group - e.g. Established.

Create a promotion for the Established user group based on your criteria.

Create a new user group - e.g. Newbie.

Set up the restrictions and banner in the Newbie user group.

Create a promotion for the Newbie user group based on your criteria and ensure "User is NOT a member of any of the selected user groups: Established" is also selected.


Option 1 - the member will be in the Registered, Newbie, and Established user groups.

Option 2 - the member will be in the Registered and Established user groups.

 

[SFFNetwork]

Thanks for the reply @Brogan! The latter approach is clever and theoretically works in our use case since we need multiple banners to be supported.

In practice I am observing that it is not working across all users, but I suspect that is because by default promotions are only processed for users when they are active. That said, even when I run the "User group promotions" cron, it does not update folks who aren't currently/recently active. How would I go about updating all existing accounts?

 

[Paul B]

I suspect that is because by default promotions are only processed for users when they are active

Correct.

Running the rebuild user group promotions task in the tools menu should do it.

 

[SFFNetwork]

Correct.

Running the rebuild user group promotions task in the tools menu should do it.

Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear: When I run that cron, it is not processing the promotion for all users. I am confirming this by observing that there are users who meet the criteria for promotion into the "Established" group (having posted at least 10 messages, and having been registered for at least 7 days) that are not in the group following me running the cron manually. For instance, my account is as old as the forum itself and has thousands of messages, and yet I am not promoted after manually running the cron five times.