Help our admin has banned all IP addresses

[anders72]

Hi!

Our forumadmin tried to stop new users from registering since we have had a lot of registrations from spammers. Now he seems to have banned all users, since I get the message "Sorry. The administrator has banned your IP address." when trying to access the control panel.

I checked the banip setting in the setting table, but it does not include my IP address.

I have no idea what he has done and how I can solve this.

Regards,
Anders

[Lynne]

He could have used a wildcard to ban users - look for a * in there. Or, he could have banned the usergroup. You should asked him exactly what he did.

[Sarteck]

What Lynne said, but also want to note that there doesn't even need to be an asterisk--you can also ban partial IP Addresses.

If you enter a complete IP address (242.21.11.7), only that IP will be banned.
If you enter a partial IP (243.21.11. or 243.21.11), any IPs that begin with the partial IP will be banned. For example, banning 243.21.11 will prevent 243.21.11.7 from accessing your board. However, 243.21.115.7 would still be able to access your board.

You may also use an '*' as a wildcard for increased flexibility. For example, if you enter 243.21.11*, many IPs will be banned including: 243.21.11.7, 243.21.115.7, 243.21.119.225.




EDIT--mispelled Lynne's name. >.>

[jackalopejoe]

Or he could have banned an isp proxy.

[anders72]

How can I fix this when I no longer have access to the control panel? I have file access to the webserver and access the database

[Sarteck]

Did you find the entry in the database that corresponds to your IP Address? If so, go into the database and delete it, ya?

[anders72]

I did not see my IP address, but there might have been a wilcard value or something

I inserted a blank value for the "banip" setting in the setting table, but how can I force the forum to reread this value?

[Sarteck]

/me blinks.

I could be wrong.... but I'm pretty sure that it reads that value every time you load a page.

[kh99]

Look in the datastore table where title=options. It's in serialized format so if you're not familiar with that, don't delete any chars just change them to spaces or whatever.

[anders72]

Look in the datastore table where title=options. It's in serialized format so if you're not familiar with that, don't delete any chars just change them to spaces or whatever.

Thanks. I set the value to blank and the length to zero.

Anders