I notice that some of the people that post here have the word “Banned” under their user name. If they are banned, how can they continue to post? What does a person have to do to get banned, anyway?
No they can’t continue to post. The reason you see posts from them with the Banned in it is the software goes back and adds the banned part into all posts by that person. There are lots of reasons why people get banned, the two most common are being a jerk, and being a reincarnation of a previous banned poster(ie sockpuppet).
But I’ve seen a post by a banned member (posted that day, I think) and then several days later, another post by that same mamber (again banned), posted that day. Has someone been banned, gotten reinstated and then banned again?
A fault in the system software enabled the creation of screen names with leading or trailing blank spaces. This let people with a propensity to create trouble, well, create lots of trouble.
Here’s how it worked. Let’s say we have a perfectly nice member of the Teeming Millions named Member123. And he’s minding his own business and everything is cool.
A new screen name is created: ( )Member 123. “( )” is a leading space, a spacebar or other whitespace character is placed before the “Member123” part.
The system reads it as an entirely new and okay screen name.
However, the system also prints it out on the board as “Member123,” skipping over the whitespace.
So . . . ( )Member123 could now make all kinds of angryfying or irritating or banal posts – and the original guy would get blamed.
So we would remove someone from the system . . . and ( )TrollWeJustBanned would pop up . . . and so on.
The system upgrade has plugged this security hole, and there’s other security factors in place that we hope will keep this from happening again.
Hope this answers your question.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Thanks Tuba, that explains much.
So, that has, in fact, been officially fixed? I’ve been wondering, but folks seem to avoid the issue. Have the related security holes also been fixed? (Not mentioning specifics here, for security purposes.)
Chronos, why not try it & see?
I see my post count go up, but I didn’t know how. oooh Magic.
But now I get it, I was wondering about the BANNED thing too
Thanks, my85 car. And Thank You TubaDiva.