How to always require approval for certain users?

CyberGene

This may be something basic that I am missing but it's the first time I need such a feature. There's a user that I think is either a bot or a troll. Is there an easy way to make his posts to always go through an approval? Is there an extension for that? What does "suspend" do, is it what I need or it's a complete ban?

I think a solution is to create a new group for such users, however the permission model is based on whitelisting group and now blacklisting, so I will have to make a lot of changes where I have "members" to emulate what would be "members except for bots", if you get what I mean.

Litalino

CyberGene admin#/extension/flarum-approval <<< Approval

CyberGene

Litalino do you mean the embedded Approval extension in Flarum? As far as I can see, it just adds a few permissions but as I said, it will require to introduce a new group for users that I need to go through an approval, and then reorganize the permissions, because currently I allow "members" to post without an approval, but I will have to create a special new group for those that should not go through an approval and it becomes a bit too complicated to maintain. I need a simple extension to just mark a user as "needs post approval" or something like that.

GreXXL

Flarum does not support "negative roles". Meaning that you would have to put every member into a group that does not need approval while setting the default to needing approval. To make this work you'd have to use something like Auto Moderator to move people to a new group after reaching a certain milestone. I think there are other / better means of controlling spam though - like https://extiverse.com/extension/blomstra/spam-preventione

CyberGene

GreXXL thanks, that's what I was afraid of, no "negative roles". Also, I've used auto-moderator in the past and had some issues with it.

The issue with some users on my forum is they are not exactly spammers. I guess they are rather trolls that are very careful in their behavior as to not really break the rules, yet at the same time disrupt within the limits of what's allowed 😕

GreXXL

CyberGene then a setup with auto modertor would make sense. If you need to have eg. 10 posts that are under approval then you know what they are made of. The issue is that this will impose a lot of effort on moderation staff to approve in time. Or you just reply on users flagging posts.

clarkwinkelmann

You could shadow ban the user and manually make their content visible again https://discuss.flarum.org/d/27555-shadow-ban unfortunately it won't appear in the flags dropdown, you would have to look for the content manually. An option could be introduced in the extension to automatically flag new shadow hidden content.