We run a course forum using Discourse and one of our students received this notification:
Hello,
This is an automated message from XXX Forum to let you know that your account has been temporarily placed on hold as a precautionary measure.
Please do continue to browse, but you won’t be able to reply or create topics until a staff member 3 reviews your most recent posts. We apologize for the inconvenience.
For additional guidance, refer to our community guidelines.
Their account seems to be active now because they are able to do everything in forum again, but we’re wondering what different scenarios would trigger this automated message in Discourse. Did they maybe post too much too quickly so it was interpreted as spam?
Yes, this is the case that happens more often, usually if a text is copied-pasted and the reply button clicked too quickly. Other triggers can be, for example, if a post receives too many spam flags or if a staff member silence a user.
You can check which trigger is the most used on your site looking at /admin/logs/staff_action_logs and filtering for silence user.
On our board, we get these messages the OP mentions which seem to have no recipient - the recipients/participants only include the Moderators group and System and no listed user. Would this occur if, say, a spam-bot creates an account, tries to post, and the account gets deleted for another reason after being silenced?
After investigation, I think I answered my own question - now that I understand what’s going on, I can see in the logs where a user was reviewed and deleted shortly after this message was sent, and that is most likely the reason for a moderator “your account is on hold” message with no user in the recipient group.
