Banning forum members

[RivaOni]

OK over at gamepulse there is a complete and utter lunatic that i've tried twice already to ban, I've banned everything from his IP and email to his host address. yet he's returned again. Is there anything that I can do to stop him registering on the boards? Is there a way of reporting him to anything in particular

[Shurikane]

Look at his hostmark if possible. If he truly is that bad, you might want to use the hostmark to ban part of his ISP. The hostmark will look something like this: johndoe@123-456-789-01.mi.fl.cox.net or johndoe@123-456-789-01 or johndoe@A453HHN.ipt.aol.com I think you get the picture. Hostmarks are primarily used on the IRC chat channels but if your forum is able to check these out, then it's a bit more power to you, as you can figure out repeating members.

If the IP ban doesn't work, that means the dude has dynamic IP. Either he is on dialup, or DSL. On DSL, the IP tends to be recurring or stays within a certain range. But on dialup, it's almost completely random.

If all else fails, you can just keep banning him until he gets tired. The one rule of the game here is not to say a thing about it. Just stealth ban and there you go.

[GD]

I had some experience with this over at the old PSOtakus forums. As mentioned above, IP bans are sometimes ineffective, especially with AOL users or other ISP's with dynamic IP addresses. Banning email addresses doesn't work, as the offender can simply go make a new free account somewhere. Banning IP ranges is also hit or miss, and never worked in my experience.

I agree with Shurikane's advice, and that was pretty much what I had to do several times. Just keep squashing the loser's accounts as they pop up, eventually they will get tired of making new ones and move on. It takes them 5 minutes or more to make a new account, and you only 5 seconds to delete it. It's a war of attrition at that point. Good luck.

[RivaOni]

I tried banning his hostname thing, not sdure if it worked yet, but my admin guy (i may run and do everything on gamepulse, but someone else owns the domain) put a wildcard ip ban on, if this causes any problems ill remove that, thanks for your help