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Over in The Nineteenth Byte, we've recently been experiencing a slightly disruptive form of spamming from suspended users. The user repeatedly joins and leaves the room, often multiple times a minute, meaning that the joining/leaving animation happens over and over again. This is disruptive to the users in the room trying to chat, as evidenced by this, this and this

Unfortunately, one of those occurrences resulted in messages being moved to the private Trashcan, meaning that they are only visible to moderators/staff

These users are actively disrupting chat rooms, and often have usernames designed to catch attention, or to get users to read their profiles. However, we have basically no ability to prevent this. Kicking them would be an appropriate action to take, but you cannot kick-mute suspended users. We've had moderators destroy the accounts, but this isn't a sustainable fix, and it even appears that this can be circumvented, as we believe that this has been the same user under three different accounts (all suspended or destroyed)

It's already been asked what the appropriate course of action here is, but nothing came from it, and the advice given by Journeyman doesn't really help when users are being this disruptive. Therefore, I'm asking for some kind of ability for room owners and moderators to help prevent this kind of behaviour. The ability to kick-mute suspended users would be great, as would the ability to hide a specific user's joining/leaving animation.

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    Also, note also that deleted and destroyed users can simply return by undeleting their account. It re-applies the suspension, and their lack of reputation means their profile image and name will no longer show up, but the disruption still happens. I've done everything that I, as a moderator, have the capability and functionality to do, and it's not enough to do anything about this. Honestly, an easy fix would just be to remove the "you can't kick-mute suspended users", at least for mods, or even better, allow mods to kick-mute a user from a room for a selected amount of time.
    – hyper-neutrino
    May 14, 2021 at 1:26
  • Highly related: meta.stackexchange.com/q/250161/323179
    – Laurel
    May 14, 2021 at 1:31
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    @SonictheAnonymousHedgehog that was basically dismissed with a "just ignore it" though. This has been going on for well over a week, only stopping when the user had a sock that had not yet been suspended. As much as I appreciate Journeyman's answer, I'd like to see some changes regarding this, because this keeps going on and the user probably/definitely knows by now that I'm not actually able to stop him. Specifically, we now have a rather concrete example of a persistent issue.
    – hyper-neutrino
    May 14, 2021 at 1:40
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    @SonictheAnonymousHedgehog The questions are, I suppose, the same. But, as hyper-neutrino pointed out, that wasn't resolved in any meaningful way. If you want, you can treat this as a "Ok, sure, this was addressed in the past. But literally nothing came about from it, and it's still a very irritating problem. Here's a refresher, mind doing something about it" post, in some effort to get SE to provide tools to correct this. Especially since, as pointed out by hyper, this shouldn't be this difficult to prevent
    – caird coinheringaahing
    May 14, 2021 at 1:44
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    hm, My answer covers what we can do now - it might be better to scope this as a request for better tools or suggestions for it - if our tools are inadequate to the task, it might be good to ask for a hammer rather than trying to bash in nails with a chocolate covered banana.
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    May 14, 2021 at 1:55
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    Does this answer your question? You cannot kick suspended users (see Shog's last comment) or these dupes, meta.stackexchange.com/q/264249/282094 meta.stackexchange.com/a/238279/282094
    – Rob
    May 14, 2021 at 2:12
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    @cairdcoinheringaahing - this would be better off converted to a feature request with reference to the older Q&A and your situation as a use case. Otherwise it is likely, unfortunately, to get closed against the old target.
    – Oleg Valter is with Ukraine
    May 14, 2021 at 2:58
  • Are you sure it is not caused by low-quality 3G connections (not a rhetorical question)? That is often seen on IRC channels (e.g., Freenode).
    – This_is_NOT_a_forum
    May 15, 2021 at 19:59
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    @P.Mort.-forgotClayShirky_q - there was a now deleted answer from the suspended user in question confirming that they tried to make a point :)
    – Oleg Valter is with Ukraine
    May 15, 2021 at 20:07
  • A chat dev request? Obligatory +1, and obligatory "in our dreams"
    – TylerH
    Jun 14, 2021 at 18:46

1 Answer 1

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If a user isn't logged in, they won't show up on the user list - quite simply treating them as any user who doesn't have chat rights (currently they're treated as "anonymous").

We could treat suspended users or users with no chat rights the same way. A suspended user or one without enough rights to chat (excepting users who have been given explicit chat rights) shouldn't be visible on the chat user list. That'll take away the annoyance, and incentive for joining and disconnecting.

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