Awaiting feedback Time out on opening moderated users

Alpha1

Well-known member
Loading /admin.php?users/moderated when there are thousands of members to moderate leads to a time out for some of my staff.
This page really needs a rewrite/tweak in terms of loading, display and functionality. its not suited for big boards.
 
Why do you have so many members in the queue? Has this built up over time? Or are all new registrations moderated?

I've seen the mod queue at one of the big boards and it usually has 3-4 people in the queue at a time.

Is the system being used correctly if it contains that many people?
 
All registrations are moderated. We have several moderators moderating the registration queue. At times when they are unavailable the queue tends to build up to significant numbers. Sometimes in the thousands.
 
This is obviously unrelated to the bug now. It possibly could do with being paginated for sure.

But what is the driving force that dictates a big board to decide they are going to impose such a time expensive process? Is it for anti spam? Some other reason? Isn't there anything you can do to automate it, impose automatic restrictions on new users and then subsequently automatically promote after certain criteria?
 
We get about 1250 registrations a week. In general we process registrations very quickly. When staff is unavailable it can build up to a substantial amount.

After trying out various approaches in the last 11 years we have found it better to stop problematic registrations right at the door and deny low quality registrations. Yes, its a little time consuming, but in the end it proves to be much less effort than cleaning up the problematic content that low quality users create. An important factor is that we review the content of custom profile fields and the website profile field to establish the validity of the registration.
We do indeed apply other restrictions to new members and have a lot of anti-spam and anti-abuse measures in place. Reviewing new accounts is an important part of our protocol. In general my site is free from spam and abuse and members generally post rich content.
In surveys our members state that one of the main reasons for registering on my site is that they did not find any other website free of spam and abuse.

I do plan on having a number of addons created which automatically approve/block/defer registrations if certain conditions are met.

On vbulletin we process a simple list of moderated accounts, with 1 account per row. 40 rows per pagefold on my screen. Its a matter of one click per account, and then hitting the 'continue' button. On xenforo this page is endless, because it doesn't have 1 row per registration, but one pagefold per 3 registration. 1000 accounts therefore is over 300 pages long. This makes it tedious.

It would be very useful to have 1 row per registration and pagination added. This would prevent the page from timing out and improve usability.
 
What part of this thread gave you the impression that this wasn't being done? :confused:
The bit where @Alfa1 told us that they were getting 1250 registrations proves that it's not being done.
I have both options on mine. I manually approve registrations but the ones that don't have valid emails don't get through.
I also don't allow people to use free email addresses such as gmail.com due to the spambots using them.
 
The bit where @Alfa1 told us that they were getting 1250 registrations proves that it's not being done.
I have both options on mine. I manually approve registrations but the ones that don't have valid emails don't get through.
I also don't allow people to use free email addresses such as gmail.com due to the spambots using them.

I have owned sites and work with sites that get more than that in a week with email validation turned on. I don't know his site but I imagine it is a leader in his niche so it isn't far fetched that he is seeing that volume with valid emails.
 
@Alfa1 try email validation to bring your amount of registration process down.
I cant imagine running a big board without email validation. We also block disposable email domains, multiple accounts, apply SFS, projecthoneypot and quite a few measures that limit low quality registrations.

The issue is not that we get too many registrations. We try to increase that number constantly.
 
I cant imagine running a big board without email validation. We also block disposable email domains, multiple accounts, apply SFS, projecthoneypot and quite a few measures that limit low quality registrations.

The issue is not that we get too many registrations. We try to increase that number constantly.
Upgrade one of your moderators to super mod and give them the powers to approve and disapprove accounts to help you out.
 
I have owned sites and work with sites that get more than that in a week with email validation turned on. I don't know his site but I imagine it is a leader in his niche so it isn't far fetched that he is seeing that volume with valid emails.
Same here.
In fact i have got multiple question/answer capcha which makes it harder for spammers to jump on board
 
This page is already limited -- it only shows 100 at a time, though even that is probably unnecessarily high.

But really, the question here is what element specifically is slowing it down. This could be related to the reverse IP look ups, which is a tricky issue as it's likely fast in 99% of cases but the last set could potentially cause timeouts.

I would need ACP and FTP (or similar) access to debug this. If that can be provided, please submit a ticket with those details and reference this bug.
 
I have this same issue. A sudden on set of spammers signed up and now I can't get into the Users Awaiting Moderation page. It times out every time.

Is there a SQL statement I can use to truncate the table / delete the entries? I don't know the schema to well, so could use some advice.
 
Have worked out what I think the issue is. Line 760 of XenForo_ControllerAdmin_User does a hostname lookup. If for some reason your server has trouble with DNS lookups, then you will come a cropper. I edited my instance to simply return false to $user['ipHost'], and hey presto, a speedy XenForo.
 
Just a suggestion.

Presumably in most cases the host lookup would be required, but if the page was paginated with a customer per page setting and settings to quickly select Reject / Approve / Do nothing to all that would alleviate the timeout and usability issues.
 
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