Lack of interest We NEED to Find Our USERS in the Database

[Oldengine]

Everybody wants to hide from everybody else! You know, scammers, spammers, identity theft. They don't put those suckers in jail anymore.

Registered Users tend to use fake user names, different email addresses, and different physical locations. Then when a user decides that they like our forum and wants to subscribe, they send a PayPal and their PayPal user name IS different from their Forum user name and their email address is different too, plus the city and state on PayPal don't match that what's on our forum., that's a problem!

We NEED to quickly Find Our USERS in the Database! User Name, Real Name, Location, IP Number, ANYTHING that can help us to identify them and bring up their account.

This also goes for new users awaiting approval! The Approval Queue needs an open Display of Location, Interests and IP number without hover over or drop-downs so that we can quickly determine if the IP is out of whack with where they say they are. Falsified locations from a totally different area call for an immediate DELETE! When you have 50 new users per day, this has to be quick or you will be snowed under.

Just a few things from a 15-year vBulletin Administrator who used to approve new users much more quickly than on XenForo.

 

[AndrewSimm]

It sounds like you are asking for some type of user validation during registration that will verify the identity of a user.

 

[Lukas W.]

I don't want to step on your toes here, but if you've been banning/deleting users whos IP addresses don't match with their entered location for 15 years, you've pretty much been doing it wrong for the last 15 years.

IP addresses don't point to a devices physical address, but to the providers data center. In many cases, that's likely in close proximity, but not always. Especially for mobile devices, this might even be on the other side of the country. There's also dozens of proxies that aren't aimed at hiding their identity, such as Chromes Data Compression tools on android devices, and countries that need proxies to even access the internet because of country-wide firewalls, which will resolve to entirely different countries even. If you're going by IPv4, some providers also have multiple IPv6 addresses resolve to a single IPv4 address, so the field gets even more vague.
And even if every single IP would point to a users location with pinpoint accuracy, what is with users that: Travel, visit their families, work in a different location, study abroad, etc.?

 

[webbouk]

I dont know how youve got yours set up but when a registered user purchases an upgrade on our busy forums their forum membername is passed with the Paypal notification.
The upgrade is automatically processed, a I dont need to do anything

 

[Kirby]

Registered Users tend to use fake user names [...] their email address is different too, plus the city and state on PayPal don't match that what's on our forum., that's a problem!

Seems like I too don't understand you issues.

How can users fake a username (unless they are using special unicode characters to make a username visually similar to an existing one, which you can prevent by using a Regex)?

It also doesn't really matter which E-Mail-Address they do use for PayPal, unless there is a problem with processing the transaction (which really doesn't happen too often), account upgrades are fully automatic - they do not require any data like username email, country, etc. to match beween your forum and PayPal.