Banning users

Banning a user shuts them out of the entire Comentario instance: a banned user can no longer sign in, neither to the Administration UI nor on any website with comments. Banning is reversible, and unbanning lets the user back in with their account as it was.

Banning is a superuser privilege, as it affects the user across all domains. Domain owners and moderators have other means at their disposal.

What a ban does

• Signing in is refused, with every authentication method: email and password, social login, and SSO. Each attempt is recorded in the audit log as a Denied sign-in.
• Existing sessions stop working right away: wherever the user is signed in, their next request is refused.
• The account can’t be re-registered: the user’s email address remains taken, so they can’t simply sign up again with it.
• Everything else stays: the user’s profile, domain roles, and, unless you choose otherwise, their comments, which remain visible on your websites.

A banned user is marked with a Banned badge in the user lists, and the user’s properties tell when they were banned.

Banning a user

1. Open Users in the sidebar of the Administration UI and click the user.
2. Click Ban user.
3. In the confirmation dialog, optionally choose what to do with the user’s comments, on all domains:
   • Delete all user’s comments marks them deleted. Their text is removed, but they remain in the comment tree as placeholders, so that replies to them stay in place (whether deleted comments are shown at all depends on the domain setting).
   • Permanently delete all comments, including replies, in addition, removes them from the database altogether, along with all replies to them, including those written by other users.
4. Confirm.

You can’t ban yourself, nor Comentario’s system accounts.

Unbanning a user

Click Unban user in the user’s properties and confirm. The user can sign in again right away, with their account, roles, and settings as they were before the ban.

A ban only refuses the user’s sessions, it doesn’t end them: sessions that haven’t expired in the meantime work again after unbanning. If you’d rather have the user sign in anew — for instance, because the account may have been compromised — click Expire all sessions in the user’s properties as well.

Comments deleted along with the ban stay deleted.

Keeping track

Every ban and unban is recorded in the audit log (actions user.ban and user.unban), along with the superuser who did it, the comment deletion options chosen, and the number of comments deleted. The user’s sign-in attempts during the ban show up there, too, as denied ones.

These entries are visible to superusers only: neither the banned user nor the owners of the domains they’re a member of can see them.

Banning or deleting?

Deleting a user removes the account for good, and scrubs their name and email from the audit log. That’s the right thing for a user who asks to be forgotten, but not for an abuser:

• a deleted user’s email address becomes free, so they can sign up again with it;
• you lose track of who they were.

A ban keeps both the account and its history, so it’s the better choice whenever you want to keep someone out. It’s also reversible, in case you change your mind.

Alternatives to a ban

A ban is an instance-wide measure. Within a single domain, owners can choose milder ones:

• Make the user Read-only on the domain, in the Domain users section: they can still read comments and sign in, but no longer write comments there (see roles).
• Moderate their comments, by rejecting or deleting them, or tighten the domain’s moderation rules so that comments are held for approval.
• Ask a superuser to ban the user when they’re a problem beyond a single domain.

See also

• Audit log
• Roles
• Superuser