Coventry...will XenForo have an equivalent?

Wildcat Media

Well-known member
I don't recall seeing an add-on, and the only Coventry discussion I saw on the boards here was related to the tale of how Tachy made his trip to Coventry many years ago.

I just realized that on our "big board", we had to use Coventry in a couple of instances where we did not (or could not, for a few reasons) get rid of one member's threads through deletion, but instead, put them in Coventry. And this could be a problem.

Without a Coventry mechanism, what is going to happen when I convert from vB3 to XF? Are these all suddenly going to reappear? Or, is there a way I could set certain members' posts (a few of these number in the thousands) into a "moderated" status so they do not display? Only thing is, this would appear in the admin/moderator bar as an alert at the top of the screen, and with as much activity as we have, none of the staff could keep track of the number if it changed.

I'm open for ideas. I don't want this to be the one issue keeping us from converting to XF. And worse, I don't want to downgrade from vB3 to vB4.1.
 
Here's a picture of XenForo's User Discouragement feature options. It's not the same as Tachy, but it does a similar job of eventually driving the user away.

user-discouragement.webp
XenForo has the "discouraged user" feature. Isn't that the equivalent?
Not exactly, because Tachy is like a global ignore–no one ever sees that user's posts.
 
Not exactly, because Tachy is like a global ignore–no one ever sees that user's posts.

That's exactly what we need--"Miserable Users" in vB is equivalent to XF's "Discouragement." Coventry hides all of a person's posts from public view, and there is no XF equivalent yet. Since we do use it, and its use is quite important for the type of forum we have (need to hide a user's posts without
"pruning" them), it's a must-have.

Even if we could do a batch soft-delete of all of one person's posts, that would get us by. Hard delete (aka physical removal) is out of the question.
 
That's exactly what we need--"Miserable Users" in vB is equivalent to XF's "Discouragement." Coventry hides all of a person's posts from public view, and there is no XF equivalent yet. Since we do use it, and its use is quite important for the type of forum we have (need to hide a user's posts without
"pruning" them), it's a must-have.

Even if we could do a batch soft-delete of all of one person's posts, that would get us by. Hard delete (aka physical removal) is out of the question.
Well, XenForo 1.1 will have an ignore feature. If you're handy with PHP code (you could hire a programmer if not), I think you could probably extend it and make it so a user will be one everyone's ignore list if you add them to a special list which would do the same thing.
 
Well, XenForo 1.1 will have an ignore feature. If you're handy with PHP code (you could hire a programmer if not), I think you could probably extend it and make it so a user will be one everyone's ignore list if you add them to a special list which would do the same thing.

I know I can't just flag these members as "ignored" with everyone, as they'd show up in each member's "ignore" list. But your idea is similar to what I had in mind--just a simple way to hide a member's posts from everyone. Heck, we could do it with one database column and some PHP; I do something similar for a couple of product catalogs I've built (I flag products and product lines as "active" or "inactive," so a client can work on their catalog without the products displaying until they are ready).

I just don't want to touch the core XF files, as that makes updates difficult to handle. Hoping there might be a way to do this via an add-on, or wish for an official addition to the code in a future version.

Just thinking about it, though, the quick and dirty way would be to soft-delete each of the member's posts using a database query. It accomplishes the same thing, but requires direct database to pull off. (Meaning, I'm the only one capable of doing it in the future.)
 
I know I can't just flag these members as "ignored" with everyone, as they'd show up in each member's "ignore" list. But your idea is similar to what I had in mind--just a simple way to hide a member's posts from everyone. Heck, we could do it with one database column and some PHP; I do something similar for a couple of product catalogs I've built (I flag products and product lines as "active" or "inactive," so a client can work on their catalog without the products displaying until they are ready).

I just don't want to touch the core XF files, as that makes updates difficult to handle. Hoping there might be a way to do this via an add-on, or wish for an official addition to the code in a future version.

Just thinking about it, though, the quick and dirty way would be to soft-delete each of the member's posts using a database query. It accomplishes the same thing, but requires direct database to pull off. (Meaning, I'm the only one capable of doing it in the future.)
With the way XenForo is coded, what I was talking about would allow you to create an add-on and extend the functionality of the feature without modifying the core code. :) You can pretty much do that to almost any part of XenForo, and it's how most of the add-ons you see here are created.

Obviously it's hard to say exactly how to do it without having the code in hand yet, but I'm sure you can flag a member as being ignored by everyone without actually having it show up on everyone's list.
 
It better work better than it did on vB. It was absolutely worthless to me then. If you placed someone on that, ALL their posts disappeared. That shouldn't happen. Only the posts they make AFTER you place them on that should disappear.
 
It better work better than it did on vB. It was absolutely worthless to me then. If you placed someone on that, ALL their posts disappeared. That shouldn't happen. Only the posts they make AFTER you place them on that should disappear.

Yep! That!

And admins/mods should be able to bypass conventry and see all the posts.
 
It better work better than it did on vB. It was absolutely worthless to me then. If you placed someone on that, ALL their posts disappeared. That shouldn't happen. Only the posts they make AFTER you place them on that should disappear.

This won't apply to everyone though--when we need a member's posts to disappear, they all need to disappear. Since we now have converted our big board over to XF, not having Coventry has created numerous problems for us. We have a couple of members whose posts needed to disappear for reasons I can't go into here (not for anything they did wrong), and all we could do currently was do a database query to soft-delete the posts.

A time-limited feature might be good as an option ("Coventry" only after a certain date), but that would add complexity to the database query and would not be good performance-wise for larger boards. I would rather not have it as default though, and if I did not select it, I would not want that date-based selectivity as part of the query.
 
I guess I can see a reason why you might need all of Tachy's posts to disappear. But for my needs, that would let the cat out of the bag so to speak. We have a resident troll that doesn't really break any rules, just pushes the envelope far enough to get a rise out of everyone. He's an attention hound. Then when everyone asks him to leave, he posts polls asking if he should leave or not. Even when the votes is 96% "yes" he only leaves for a month or two then returns.

I need him to fall off everyone's radar...except mine. Then he should lose interest and go away on his own when he fails to get responses to his troll bait. A couple of his fans would scream censorship if all of a sudden all his old posts disappeared, whereas if it only affected posts from here on out, they'd just think he left. Problem solved.
 
Global ignore is a nice tool to have. I use it for the "I'm leaving and I demand you delete all my posts now" crowd. One click and they are gone and the ex-member is on his happy way. Wait a couple months, give the account a generic name and poof all the posts are back.
 
It better work better than it did on vB. It was absolutely worthless to me then. If you placed someone on that, ALL their posts disappeared. That shouldn't happen. Only the posts they make AFTER you place them on that should disappear.
That would be much better, but I'm assuming even then they'll find out. But honestly this is a weird feature to me, I'd rather just perm ban members than try to fool them like this. Especially if they're going to find out anyway.
 
That would be much better, but I'm assuming even then they'll find out. But honestly this is a weird feature to me, I'd rather just perm ban members than try to fool them like this. Especially if they're going to find out anyway.

I have members who don't cross the line as far as getting a ban, but tend to post things that are so outrageously out there, it would be best to just let them post, but not show up to everyone.
 
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