Issues with people on tapatalk, private messaging and no posts to speak of.

[forums]

I'm an administrator on a forum with xenforo installed, and I've noticed lately that we're getting a lot of new members who join up, and immediately go to private messaging, but never post anything on the forum. I'll give you an example..... One fellow (the first one I clued in to on this issue) joined us in Dec 2017 and right off, and a couple times a day, he swings by, and when you click on him to see what he's up to, it says "Member (X) On Tapatalk, Engaged In Conversation" and yet for weeks, I never saw anyone else on the forum engaged in conversation. Just this one guy. This happens at least twice and up to 3 to 5 times a day. Never posts anything. I asked him a question once, he replied immediately, then when I asked him further questions, ignored me, then continued private messaging. Now we have several members, a few of which joined around the same time as this one fella, and we're seeing more and more private conversations, and not one of them are posting. The original fella, his I.P is almost always Chicago but at least 3 times, his I.P. came back from China. My staff and I are contemplating starting to ban these guys, which seem to be just using our private messing system to conduct business or something. The original guy, I did put him in discourage mode, then banned him and despite this, he still stops in several times a day now for weeks, and views the forum list now that he's been banned. What could possibly be going on here guys?

 

[S Thomas]

Well, you're the admin, you tell us what's going on with them. You could look into the conversations tables to find that out.

 

[forums]

Well, you're the admin, you tell us what's going on with them. You could look into the conversations tables to find that out.

It's not my site. I'm only able to access the administrator's control panel where I can do a number of things including merge his account into mine or another account I have at the forum, then access his messages from there I believe, but I haven't attempted it and don't really feel comfortable reading his private messages. I was just wondering more than anything if there is an on going problem with message abuses or high school kids signing up to forums to use the private messaging? Is there a way to utilize xenforo to facilitate a minimum post count of XX before folks can private message?

 

[forums]

Also, we had a member of our forum was banned for openly trying to get our community to join his forum. I banned him and he rejoined under another name then started PMing our community one member at a time, to invite them to his forum. One of our community alerted me to this guys private message. I wonder if these guy's are doing the same since they are on our site several times a day. Any help or advice would be appreciated!

 

[Paul B]

You will need to be associated with a license in order to obtain support.

The license owner can do that here: https://xenforo.com/customers/forum-users