This section allows the administrator to manage the ban rules. The ban rules are used to filter user registrations automatically, using various criteria. This is useful, when the site administrator does not want a certain person, or a group of people, to register on the In-portal site, however does not want to review all registrations manually. This seemly straightforward task is actually very difficult to do on the Internet. There is no bulletproof way to identify a real person when they are registering online; one has only indirect information to rely on – the information that the person submits or has the ability to change. Therefore, the idea behind banning is to create as many accurate rules as possible that would filter out the majority of the unwanted people.

This section also allows the administrator to execute selected rules on the existing user database, banning the users, which fall under those rules, but registered before the rules where created and enforced.

When a new user registration is banned, the visitor will receive an error message, and will not be able to complete the registration. When an existing user is banned, they are disabled.

The ban rule form has the following fields:

• Rule Type – this field designated the type of the rule. There are ‘Deny’ rules and ‘Allow’ rules. The ‘Deny’ rules, when they match a user record, deny the registration. The ‘Allow’ rules work in the opposite way – when such rule is matched with a user record, the user registration is allowed. The conflicts between allow and deny rules are resolved based on the priority of each rule. (Conflicts occur, when one or more opposite rules match the same user record).

• Item Field – this drop down selects the User attribute, which is going to be matched against the rule value.

• Field Comparison – this drop down selects the type of the match, in other words the comparison operation that will be performed. The match types do what their names mean. Please use the ‘Any’ type with extra caution. It does not perform a comparison, but instructs the rule to match all user records, regardless of any other options.

• Field Value* - this field contains the value that will be used when matching the rule.

• Error Tag – this field contains the name of the language variable that contains the text, which will be displayed on the front-end, when a user registration is denied due to this rule. Leave it blank, if you do not want to provide an error message. Please keep in mind, that it is theoretically possible that a rule will deny registration to a person you did not intend to be banned, and design the error messages accordingly.

• Priority – this field sets the priority of the rule, which is used for resolving the conflicts when more than one rule is matched with the same user record.

• Status – this field enables and disabled rules.

For example, you as a site administrator, notice that there is a person that registers with “ACME Corp” words in their user name, email, first and last names, etc. You suspect that this user is trying to advertise their company, and you want to prevent them from using your site in that way. However, you are not sure, what exact names this person will use in the future – all you know is that they want to include the company name – ACME. In this situation, you would set up three ban rules. They will be of type ‘Deny’, on Item fields ‘User name’, ‘First name’ and ‘Last name’, using Field Comparison ‘Contains’, and the Field Value ‘ACME’. Optionally, you can create a message for that person, for example “Sorry, no ACME advertising allowed on this site.” The priority is not important in this case, because a match on any of the three fields is sufficient to ban the user. The status should be set to ‘Enabled’. Now, that person will not be able to register with the word ‘ACME’ in their user name, or first or last name. You may also want to run these three rules on your existing user database, in case you missed some of the previous registrations by that user.