You're having trouble with
a problem poster -- or you know other people have had problems with trolls
on their boards, and you'd like to avoid drawing trolls to yours. How
do you keep only the people you want in your community?
Scroll down the page until you find Access Control, shown above.
On the right side of the table, click New, (marked with the cursor)
You'll reach the Groups:
New screen
Give your group a name and
a description, then go to Group Verification, the most important
part of this process if your interest is in controlling your board traffic
Open Access lets anyone into your group. With this option, you have little control
over trolls
Approval Required means that you'll have to go in and personally clear each applicant to your community. This can be a lot of work if you have a busy community,
but does a good job of weeding out some troublemakers
Valid E-mail Required -- Anyone who provides a real email address can join your group without
any effort on your part. This gives you a way to track down problem
users, but not really a way to keep them out in the first place
Approval + Valid E-Mail
Required -- they
have to provide a valid email address, and then you have to decide whether
you want them in. This is pretty effective in weeding out potential
troublemakers -- people who go through this level of screening to get
to your community will generally do so only because they want to participate.
You'll lose a lot of potential members, however.
Membership Closed -- you have to add the login name of each person you want on the board
by hand. This is useful for special-privilege groups like moderators,
but pretty impractical for an entire community. On the other hand, it's
very, very secure.
Once you've decided on your
group characteristics, filled out the information you want them to have
before they join, and decided what information you want from them before
you'll unlock the doors, click the Create button at the bottom
of the page. (If you make a mistake or change your mind, no problem. Everything
is editable by you at any time.)
Click Login at the
top left of your screen to go back to your main resources page
Now go to the Forum for which you want to controll access
Click Edit
Click Access Control,
the option marked by the cursor in the picture above
This is where creating your
Group(s) really goes to work to keep troublemakers off your boards
First, severly limit access
to the Anyone group. No Access, Read Only, and Post Moderated are all good for preventing flames and trolling
from anonymous posters and random strangers
Treat the Anyone with
a Network54 Login group about the same.
Give the privileges to your
private groups. Let them Post, Revise, Edit and Delete,
depending on what you want them to be able to do on each board.
Go through each group you
have, and each board and chat room, setting privileges. When you're
finished, you will have prevented or eliminate most of your trolling
problems. And the ones that remain will be people who are logged in,
and who can be identified and reported.
