A new global banning system is not necessary!

[CrystalVulpine]

The reddit admins did indeed remove their separate admin frontends from the open source version, which is how suspensions and shadowbans are done, but they did NOT strip out the backend. Suspensions are enabled to an account with the in_timeout flag. I also saw a todo about refactoring the global ban variable to _spam. Well that flag is already implemented, enabling it shadowbans the user. I even found their "we're going to change your password to be assholes" function that they infamously used on ChuckSpears, KamensGhost, go1dfish, and myself (it's done by setting _banned to 1). The only thing that doesn't work is temporary suspensions, apparently reddit has a separate program lifting them once the duration is up as otherwise they become permanent. If we want to send a notification when a user is suspended that's something we'll have to do ourselves too, but it should be trivial.

I have tested all of these (on reddit, not saidit) using the console, and they are fully functional. All that's needed is a frontend. This might work better since it doesn't need a banned user list in the database, which is having serious "error: 500" problems right now. It simply sets a flag on that user.

I am making this issue because based on the comments I'm seeing the devs did not realize that reddit's functionality was present, and thought they had to make one from scratch.

Also it might be better to find alt accounts with cookies and browser fingerprints rather than trying to rely on IP addresses, magnora7 said this is a problem. If we could make it so that every new account the mass-spammers make is automatically shadowbanned that would be a huge help.

[libertysoft3]

Related: https://github.com/libertysoft3/saidit/issues/98

[CrystalVulpine]

I've now created a frontend for this.

[CrystalVulpine]

Resolved by #121