Unless there's something else going on this has to be the worst bug I've ever come across in my 25 years of computing.

I'm an admin for vancouver.indymedia.org - currently in beta, running 4.7.

As it is an Indymedia site we are constantly having to deal with trolls, hence our excitement at seeing that there is a module to help us deal with this.

HOWEVER... when I ban someone (AND block their IP address) using the troll module it:

1) does NOT block them from logging in again,
2) promotes them to the administrator role!

How can this possibly be? Can there possibly be any worse bug than a user-blocking mechanism that doesn't block them and instead promotes them to administrator??

Comments

catch’s picture

catch
he/him
Primary language English
commented

We just installed the troll module and the same thing happened first time we used it. I'm not sure it actually promotes to admin though, might be a node access conflict. Using 4.7.3 drupal, 4.7.0 troll.module (21/08/06) release.

Are you using any other role privacy modules?

The closest I've got to working out what might be going on is this:

We use taxonomy access control to restrict access to administrative forums. We set up a "banned" user role, and thinking that troll.module would block it completely, didn't bother to manually block the forums in tac access. So when the user was banned, they actually were given access to admin forums (since tac defaults to "view" the way we've got it set up - it gave them all-seeing (and posting) permissions). If troll.module is using node access tables, then it may have similar conflicts to OG/simple access/tac/tac-lite etc. - these should be documented though.

Fortunately the bannee was having an angry pm conversation with another admin at the time, and told us they could see us discussing whether to ban them or not, so we sorted the tac privileges out sharpish.

If it does actually promote to administrative privileges, that's even worse though, but the above seems more plausible. Either way it's a critical issue whether docs or code.

I'm an admin on another left site, maybe it only affects those.

rneal’s picture

rneal commented

I noticed that in the settings in administer-->settings-->troll there is an option:

User Blocking
Troll Block Role:
[admin]
Select the role to set users to when blocking from the troll adminstration screens

With the default setting to admin. I was at first puzzled, then amused by this out of the box default. I setup a "blocked user" role with no permissions, and changed the setting to that.

This is probably what is causing your problem.

catch’s picture

catch
he/him
Primary language English
commented

I'd definitely made the role before I blocked the user, so I don't think that's it.

newbstah’s picture

newbstah commented

This sounds scary.

subscribing

deekayen’s picture

deekayen commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

I've tried to reproduce this and no matter the assigned role, the Troll ban function sets the user status to blocked, which denies logins.