New Registration Issue

[Snowhog]

Contacted by new user attempting to register with our Forum. vBulletin responds to registrant that the email address they specified has been banned by an Administrator.

I've reviewed the entries in AdminCP > Settings > Options > User Banning Options > Banned Email Addresses and the address is not present, either in whole or in part.

I've reviewed our Banned Custom Usergroup and the email address is not associated with any of the entries.

How can I identify where vBulletin has this email address saved/stored? How can I troubleshoot the problem?

[glennrocksvb]

Can you ask the user the exact error message displayed on the page? I can use that as a starting point to search the error message in the Phrase Manager and then get the phrase variable used which in turn I will use to search in the PHP source code. I'd have to reverse engineer it for these kinds of unusual issues.

[Snowhog]

The complete Error pop-up reads:

Error

The administrator has banned your email address. You will need to change your email address in order to continue. If you think this is done in error, please click here to contact the administrator.

This is the image of the pop-up error:

[glennrocksvb]

I found the PHP source code that contains the logic for banning emails. It is only based on the User Banning options in AdminCP.

1. Is "Banned IP Addresses" option also configured?
2. Make sure the email addresses or email address fragments are separated by space (not newline) in the "Banned Email Addresses" option.
3. Is "Aggressive Email Banning" option enabled?

[Snowhog]

Banned IP Addresses is being used to record IPs we don't like. I put each IP on a separate line ("Place a space or a line break between each IP address.")
Aggressive email banning is set to No.

Like the IPs, I put each email address, or fragment, on it's own separate line. I know that it says "Put a space between each email address or email address fragment.", but that doesn't seem correct or responsible! I just now took the time to copy into a document, the email address and fragments we have, and carefully turned it into one-line, with a single space between each entry. That makes the single line 2,817 characters long! There is obviously a parsing limit 'at some point' that would result in a failure if I were to follow this method of recording banned email addresses/fragments.

But regardless, the email, either whole or as a fragment, doesn't appear within this file.

[glennrocksvb]

The code in core/vb/ap/user.php uses regex to find the matching email address from the configured "Banned Email Addresses" option. I can't help to test without knowing the email address used and the set of email addresses to ban. If you have a local setup of your forum, I recommended you to edit the source code and output debugging code to see what's going on.

[Snowhog]

The code in core/vb/ap/user.php

We don't have that directry (core/vb/ap). When we paid to have vBulletin Technical Support upgrade us to vBulletin 5.6.4 Patch Level 1, they apparently did so with a compressed install. Our site wasn't compressed before that, and I don't have the technical knowledge to fully uncompress it.

[glennrocksvb]

You can download an uncompressed non-PHAR version in the downloads page. Select the "More Download Options" radio button and then select "No" for the "Use compressed PHP Archive" radio button.

[Snowhog]

I just completed replacing core/vb with the uncompressed non-PHAR content. No issues encountered, and our site is functioning normally.