Questions & Answers

I am working on a blogging application in Laravel 8.

There are 4 user roles, among which, the "Super-admin". The super admin can ban all users that are not Super-admins.

The banning happens as follows:

In the users table, there is an active column of type tinyint.

In the UserRightsController controller I have this small function that does the banning:

public function ban_user($id){
      User::find($id)->update(['active' => 0]);
      return redirect()->back()->with('success', 'The user is now banned');
}

Once a user is banned, she/he will be unable to login. I have achieved this by going to vendor\laravel\ui\auth-backend\AuthenticatesUsers.php and changing this:

protected function credentials(Request $request)
{
    return $request->only($this->username(), 'password');
}

to

protected function credentials(Request $request)
{
    return array_merge($request->only($this->username(), 'password'), ['active' => 1]);
}

The problem:

Any attempt by a banned user to sign in fails, but the error message is still the default one:

These credentials do not match our records.

EDIT:

In app\Http\Controllers\Auth\LoginController.php, I have overwritten the credentials from AuthenticatesUsers.php:

protected function credentials(Request $request)
 {
   return array_merge($request->only($this->username(), 'password'), ['active' => 1]);
 }

But the issue of a specific message remains :(

Questions:

1. How do I add a custom message like: "Your account was suspended"?
2. Is there a better alternative to using return array_merge($request->only($this->username(), 'password'), ['active' => 1]) in AuthenticatesUsers.php?