Require moderation if a user was inactive for some time

taydin

Member
Here is what I'm observiing in my forum nowadays. There are many users that had signed up many years ago, and wrote a number of valid, on topic messages and as a result were taken off of the "require moderation" status. These users stay inactive for several years, and then they come back and post a dating site, gambling site, or some adult site.

To combat this, I want to be able to put users that stayed inactive for 1 year back into "require moderation" status. Is there an extension that will do this?
 
I haven't seen any add ons that will do this, but it's an easy one to code. You can put in a request at the Add on request forum and hopefully someone will code this for you.


Regarding the inactivity, do you mean based on users last activity or their last post date?
 
Not last post. Last time that user logged in would be fine I guess.

Currently, I do this operation manually. I search for users with a "Last visited between:" 1 year ago - today. And then, I take these users out of the "Verified" user group. If a user is not in the verified group, new messages will be subject to moderation.

I guess what I want is a cron job that runs monthly, does the above search, and removes all users hit from the "verified" group.
 
You can do this with a user promotion.

Use te field User has not visited for at least X days:

Move the users to a usergroup that need a moderation.
 
@Hoffi
This won't work:
The user promotion cron only processes users that were active within the last 120 minutes, this will never process users that were inactive for days.
 
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Do the reverse, make it default for all base membership group to require moderation, then create a promotion for people who’s been active in the last 120 days to be put into a group that exempts it, where it’s set to “never”.

Should work in theory.
 
@Dragonfruit That is exactly what I am doing at the moment. I have a user promotion where if somebody's message count is X, I lift moderation requirement. But if I see that the user is writing meaningful, on topic messages, I sometimes lift the moderation manually after a few messages. So that's working.

But the removal won't work as specified earlier because the cron is only taking action when the user has done some activity.
 
These users stay inactive for several years, and then they come back and post a dating site, gambling site, or some adult site.
The reason why this is happening is because those old accounts are probably hacked. Old email/password lists are being used on forums to login and post spam.

So instead of putting those users in moderation, you should security lock them. This way they are forced to reset their password so they are secure again.

I'm using this add-on, although unmaintained, still working fine:
 
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