Hello,

To be honest, I can't really guarantee this but I will try my very best to get this pushed ahead. EasySocial 1.2 was a big challenge for us because we made too many change in too short time because it eventually led to longer "beta testing" time. What I am hoping for in the upcoming releases is to have smaller changes but a more rapid release cycle. So that the testing period would still be very minimal

Hi Mark,

I understand maybe you can switch 3-4 small thing from v1.3-1.5 in place of this feature desperately needed this feature (I'm just kidding )

Thanks for looking at this, I know one customer (Beth) of yours that will be happy to have this soon aside from me. I just saw v1.6 roadmap and I see Ability to Block Friends, is this the same? If May 2014 is the target for this feature then I think it's a reasonable wait but v4.0 is way too long I guess.

Noted, thanks for the heads up on this

For now "disable the user" if they need a temporary banning. To do this, go to ES's backend > Users. You will see a column named "Enabled". Click the check icon on the user you want to manually ban. This ought to work for now. Enable the user when their ban time is up.

Thanks for sharing this Josh! Appreciate this

Thanks for sharing Josh that's my plan, but looking for a much better long term solution that doesn't need much of Site Admin time. If the community has few hundred members then manually disabling users is not bad solution but if we're talking thousand then like Mark keeps on saying it will be too tedious.

Sorry Mark I'm thinking of giving the tedious coding to you and your team.

Mark wrote:

Hello,

To be honest, I can't really guarantee this but I will try my very best to get this pushed ahead. EasySocial 1.2 was a big challenge for us because we made too many change in too short time because it eventually led to longer "beta testing" time. What I am hoping for in the upcoming releases is to have smaller changes but a more rapid release cycle. So that the testing period would still be very minimal

Mark, I am so pleased to hear you are planning to make smaller amounts of feature changes. It allows for more focused development and more focused testing to avoid development and testing fatigue.

Maybe consider measuring the current feature set plans to see what should be a major priority vs. what is nice as a feature to have but not a high priority need for the most customers.

AppWeb wrote:

Forgive me for posting this here, but I'd like to hear what people in the forum think about this feature. In Voices, it was accepted for v4.0, I personally think that is too way down the line. I'm just afraid to launch ES on the site I'm working on without this feature. I already know one person in our congregation that will definitely be ANNOYING! without the ability to block or ban a person, how else can we control members without annoying other members? If ACL is so much granular to a User level, then this feature is no longer necessary but ACLs are in Profiles so can't turn off one feature that applies to all because of one person.

Some of you might be thinking why don't I just delete the Users that are annoying, well I cannot I wish I can but in our case I cannot so a user's choice of Blocking an annoying person is something to be the choice of a member and out of my control as a Site Admin. Well, delete is something like a last resort for my situation, like a person uploads or share contents that are not acceptable by our community then it is a big reason to delete.

What do you guys think? Should this feature be added soon? Like in v1.3?

SUGGESTION TO YOU - THIS IS WHAT I WOULD DO but ti is up to you.

Why not address the issue with this ANNOYING MEMBER of your congregation before launching your new site and avoid the hassle. Lay out the network rules and get this person to SIGN an AGREEMENT OF COMMUNITY RULES (special case) that outlines their adherence for this member to obey and follow the Community Member Rules before you will allow them to sign up. If they don't sign it, then don't let them sign up in the first place. As a Network Community Administrator it is very important for you to project your Administrator authority right from the start of launching your site, otherwise some people will not respect your authority, and they will abuse the site. If this person does sign the agreement, and then breaks the Community Rules, inform them they are in BREACH OF A SIGNED AGREEMENT and then follow what are called REMEDIES of the AGREEMENT, and if they you find they do not come up with an acceptable REMEDY for the BREACH then delete them as a user from Joomla. The AGREEMENT WOULD STATE WHAT YOU DEEM AS A BREACH OF AGREEMENT and the REMEDIES FOR BREACH OF AGREEMENT. If they log back in under another identity is is pretty easy to spot them. Then you have what you need to turn them in for breaching a SIGNING AGREEMENT.

Randall

I have posted a text file example of a basic Community Rules to use as a boilerplate set of Community Form Rules, there are tons of good examples to borrow from and modify, and this is just one of many.

Randall, as stated that it's easy to block a single user. They are more concerned with dealing with hundreds of users and unblocking them. How the ban system should work (when it comes out eventuially) is by having a frontend item on the profile that allows the admin to click the button/link and set the time to disable the user. In terms of database fields used, only one new one would need to be made which is "ban-time". If the value is set to 0, it would not have a time limit to ban that user.

So this then requires the administrator to go through and set this for all the basket cases that abuse the network rules?

I can hardly imagine a site that one would need to ban hundreds of users. Sounds like a huge play room or something,

Yes. If a community has thousands of users, I could see where this would save some admin work. While I certainly see the ban feature as an important feature, I don't however see how it's urgent considering that an admin can manually do it right this second.

The playroom statement was pretty funny.

Hi Randall & Josh,

Thanks Randall for your ideas and for the sample agreement file I sure need one. Can I use this Agreement Legally?

Well, people are people and there are some loony tunes that would simply break rules I don't imagine a need to ban or block hundreds of users either but if we're talking about thousands of users and if blocking and banning is in the hand of Site Admin, well, there will be a chance. But if Users have the ability to block users that annoys them, it will free up a lot of Site Admin time in moderating the community and focus only in Reports.

Since there is a Report feature there should also be a tool to answer that Report - a whip . Like Josh said, maybe a level of how serious a Report is, Users will be Ban for a number of hours and a warning message that is pre-formatted with a button Send Warning Message, a button to Hide or Delete the reported content. Something like:

Dear User,

You have been reported to post an indecent photos in your Album <Album Name>.

We have reviewed the content and agreed with the report, we also decided to delete the content that you uploaded...

Consider this as a warning... blah blah blah.

Site Admin

Buttons Next to Reported Objects: Delete/Unpublish Content Block User Send a Message

I'm just throwing out ideas.

Randall, with the public site that you're building ES on, I would not be surprised if you needed such feature to manage Users. One ES customer Beth Gardner is saying she's managing a community of 14K+ users. If she has active users of say just a 2K a day, how many basket cases do you think would do funny things? You can see what Beth Gardner said here. It would be nice if Beth Gardner can speak to this with her experience in managing that much users. I am looking at this feature as a contingency solution when we implement ES in a couple of months. We currently have 68K active records and conservatively expecting 10% will sign-up in a month, just looking ahead for solutions to possible issues that may come up and I'm glad StackIdeas team are listening

I understand this feature is not an urgent need for most sites what I'm asking Mark is it's good to have it sooner than v4.0 - added in Voices. But if I'm reading it right, in the roadmap v1.6 this feature was already scheduled.

Thanks for your feedback guys, its good to know your insights

AppWeb,

I borrowed the example from a Accounting company forum and they probably had a lawyer look it over. I added the XXXX where you insert your site name or company name into the Commnity Rules. Modify it enough for your own perposes. I really don't think anyone from this accounting company is going to take issue with you for using the text as a boiler plate to create your own agreement specific to your needs.

My biggest issue of concern is about what I am going to do if my site takes off and becomes busy and I can't ever take a break for any time off. That s why I will be looking for some loyal members to become moderators of the site over the next 6 to 10 months as it grows in membership.

The founder of Plenty of Fish in Vancouver managed to handle millions of members by himself and did revenue of $16 million in ad revenue n one year a few years ago before he hired his first employee. He now has 75 employees. This is rare that one person could manage that many users by himself for so long.

This is why Inposted a new thread about creating a Community Managers section so the threads are all focused on learning and sharing ideas about Community Management.

I hope you will check it out. http://stackideas.com/forums/request-for-a-community-manager-category-to-be-added-to-the-forums-or-to-a-live-easysocial-area

Randall