Seven years and counting. One user name on our list. That user currently has a new/another user name, and has played well with the others since we got his attention.

Since 05.30.01
Total Bans: 18

But, 4537 "deny from" IP adresses in my .htaccess file.
:D

Does anyone remember the link to that list where it listed a lot of the IP's of web proxy services..I remember on here at one point in time there was a huge list full of them.

Man, I feel sorry if some forum owners have 500+ ban pages of spammers!

I have only had to take care of a couple of spammers, and I guess that I did ban them. My previous post is pretty hypocritical now then, isn't it? :erm:

same here... when you have more than 1% of your userlist in the ban list, that means you have a crappy forum that is not auto-moderatored... if you have 500 pages of bans, that mean you have an off-topic forum that grab all the crap from the internet to post on your site...

sorry, no matter how you deal with a forum, if you ban a user each time he does not post what you like, close your forum, close your computer, and go take a ride in mexico...

We only banned a few members, most of our bans (many thousands) are IP's of hackers and spam bots and their blacklisted open proxy IP's using a custom IP ban tool that places them in a folder, not in the C-panel ban tool.

125ish - about 100 of those are the same people over and over again.

Not True.
- I have 1000's banned across many domains.
- Everyday month is better traffic than the last month, no harm there.
- I am the auto-moderator. When they post something stupid they are warrned, then banned if it proves a bot. When enough stupid people are removed it will be clean.

I make it easy, I tally where the problems are and ban countries of IP ranges.
Wow no more problems and no missed traffic as those countries offer my site nothing anyway.

There are millions of people that want to play nice . It's easy to prune and block. :)
- .2 % of my traffic gone, but 90% of my problems .... its alll numbers and math to me.

I removed 100 users and 75K posts a few weeks ago. It's almost a site again. :)

The higher you set the standards, the more people will have trouble adjusting to them. Resulting in more bans.

My forum is completely different circumstance though. A user is not banned for his posts or his opinions, usually the only reason he is banned is if he is trying to scam someone in a trade or has scammed someone in a trade.