User Guide: Banning users

Banning is where a user account is disabled either temporarily or permanently. Accounts that are banned for a finite amount of time are "limited" and are set to user level of -1. Permanently banned users are at user level of -2. For some more information see http://www.wikimapia.org/user/tools/guidelines/ .

See also the Banning guidelines published by User:lnklnklnk.

The most common reasons for banning a user are:

• User makes massive spam (example: user puts sex.com everywhere).
• User intentionally vandalizes places (deletes info, inserts pornographic photos, etc.)
• Sockpuppet account that is created by an already banned user.
• Harassment or trolling of other users via private messages.
• Voting bad without any reason.

Note that this list is not a policy statement (yet), but it does reflect the reality of most banning actions.

Forum discussion in forum about banning users.

There are actually two user levels below UL0: Limited (UL-1) and Banned (UL-2). Limited means that while you can still create new places, you cannot make some types of changes to existing places, nor post in the Forum, for example. Banned means that you can log in, but are severely restricted in what else you can do.

Before a brand new voting system was implemented, this depended on the # of "bad" votes. The votes from UL2 users were the votes that limited and banned accounts.

There are people out there who deliberately disrupt Wikimapia (spammers, vandals) or try to use it for their own purposes (advertising). If you see Wikimapia being misused in these ways, please report this in the forum in the "User behavior and vandalism" section. When we see this we first try to contact these people and ask them to change their behaviour. If they continue their ways, further Bad votes will result in their accounts being Limited and then Banned. People who feel they have been banned unfairly should contact the admins (wikimapia@gmail.com) to get the matter resolved.