Customer Authorization Status - Not Working?

[Beeunique]

No sorry I think you misunderstand - we are happy to let everyone shop and buy as normal and would like everyone to be able to view prices etc on website and if they are happy then to create an account and purchase the items as normal - we would never simply block a person from buying or viewing the website.
But..
Sometimes we get a customer who takes up hours of our time over a £6 order - the kind of customer that you can never please - one customer in particular sends such abusive swearing messages at our staff - real nasty stuff because her 1st class order was not received the next day (one email had no less than 20 profanities, and shocked me even though i'm no prude)- we refunded to basically get rid of her and to this date we still get the occassional message from her and she has tried to order twice since this (both orders cancelled and refunded which caused even more abusive messages) - she is from an ip range so we cant block her, deleteing account means she can recreate it and changing password means she can request new one automatically. We also have the guy who lives in South Africa but continually creates an account and puts his address country as UK (along with his S/Africa address) - again we cant block ip only in this case (also IP not showing as S/Africa so something very weird with this order/account). We would ONLY like the option to block the occassional customer who causes so much hassle its not worth the order (sounds harsh I know but I am talking extreme cases like those above here). So we felt it better to change authorisation for this occassional person to view but not browse and we would of course inform them beforehand that we were closing their account and they would no longer be able to shop on the website - we would not just close and not say anything and again it would only be for someone we had previously asked not to do something or had explained something to them many many times. They could create a new account but our accounts package should alert us if the name/address account is blocked. By and large the vast majority of the customers are great and give us praise which is good to hear, however a small percentage will always be unhappy over one thing or another and we do work hard with them to ensure they get the service/items etc they expected and wanted, however some people (thankfully only 1 in 10,000 it seems) do seem to enjoy making life hard for others and when my staff receive really nasty letters from a customer we would like someway to stop these customers ordering (we would then either ignore or send a standard reply to any emails received).

Again we ALWAYS try to sort out any problem the customer has, even if its down to then misreading something or royal mail problem etc we always work hard and do whatever we can but sometimes you know that no matter what you do the customer does not want to be pleased and you know that any future order will be the same - switching their account to 'cannot purchase' and letting them know this should at least in theory stop them ordering (any new accounts created under same address etc would be alerted by our accounts package and also closed) - I know its not fool-proof and if there is another way to stop these rare unwated orders then we can do that, but just now these few people are taking up so much time in checking addresses, processing refunds, replying to numerous emails etc - any other solution would be greatfully appreciated :)

[Ajeh]

You would need the Authorization re-written to allow:

Guests to be treated as Authorized Customers until they login/create account ... where the create account would automatically Authorize then and the Login would use the current setting to keep them Authorized or ... de-authorize them so that they cannot complete the order ...

This is not a simple change, however it can be done ...

But without going through all of the code and customizing everything to handle things this way, I really cannot tell you just how many files to change or modify to allow the jobs to work in this manner ...

I have some ideas on what approach I would take, but again, I would have to re-write the code and test everything to put it all together ...

[Beeunique]

Have pm'd you