[How to] Ban effectively
 

A lot of people (so did I) asking for other hacks / plugins to ban people...

Well, the obvious solution is :

create a .htaccess file with the content

deny from <IP>

like

deny from 127.0.0.1

Put it in your forumroot - done :)

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/

Execpt for the fact, most people have dynamic ips.. and banning their ip will be worthless if it changes, besides the fact you might loose out on members...

How do you take care of spammers on Proxy then ? Banning their IP is useless, banning email anyway ?

Afaik banning by hostname is not really possible, is it ?

In short... you have very little power to ban :(

If any at all... :(

Just keep banning until they eventually go away...

Most effective way indeed; usually it takes them a way more to sign up, confirm their account and start spamming than it takes you to delete/ban them again. Usually they give up after a while.

If you have a smallish site, 1000 member or so, you can ban ISP ranges with "deny from atl.bellsouth.net". Don't use IP's, use host names! That handles all of the Atlanta, GA area. You would be surprised how unique some member IP ranges are.

Of course if you have 10 members using that ISP and live in that area you can't really do that but many many times, I have been able to do that.

Proxies are usually slow as hell and that's a deterrent for them.

isnt there a hack that allows for proxy banning? That should do it

dynamic IP's are a pain in the *ss

Imho banning is useless when u have the option to use the mighty Miserable Users hack:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=93258

There sure is, HOWEVER : a LOT of ISPs using caching, example (used a plugin to get that info):

Banning the Proxy IP would mean now banning the whole ISP - or at least part of it

just use the miserable user hack as said b4....move em into miserable, theyll soon give up..lmao

That only works if the user is logged on from the account that is meant to be made miserable.

true, and if they're an "experienced spammer" they might be aware of miserable users, and just clear cookies, and create a new account regardless... :ermm:

miserable user's hack is your best bet

When I have people who keep re-registering I put a bold statement up on the signup page stating we do not accept registrations from free e-mail providers, turn on moderating new members, and delete any registrations from free e-mail providers. A couple days of that and the problem is usually solved.

/me thinks

Now then, speaking from experience from the other side - I used to be a pretty decent pain in the ass - I have to say that the only way to get rid of someone is just to persevere (sp?) and keep banning their usernames.

Regular spammers/pains in the asses/trolls/etc have easily identifiable posting habits. Things from capitalization, spelling, punctuation, lines between sentances, etc are easy to spot after a while. It can take quite a long time to get rid of someone who is determined to be there. I believe that at one point I was going through 20-30 registrations per day for 4 months on one site. As quick as they banned me I re-registered. Proxy changed at least 15 times daily. Cable modem rebooted to change the IP there at least twice a day too. Proxies used ranging from round the corner to the other side of the world. E-mail accounts being registered and discarded as quick as empty cans of coke. In fact at one point, just to cover myself, I was even using my first jobs work address to register email accounts to in case they tried to find me that way. E-mail accounts from hotmail to yahoo to my ISP to hivemail on other sites were used. Eventually though I just got fed up.

Perhaps I took an abnormally long time to do so, but in the end I did.

I'm not IP banned from the site but apart from a casual glance around Feb this year I haven't been back, probably only about a total of a dozen times in the 2.5 years since I gave up.

So whatever you do, don't panic, just be prudent with the ban button. Don't post personal details of offenders on your site as it just makes them angry and more determined to get through to cause you more trouble.

problem with ban the IP, it doesnt work for me.. i type in my IP, it doesnt, i type in my net ip it works.. so abit dodgy there..

I've found it easiest to deal with persistent problem makers, spam bots etc by creating a new usergroup and adding those nuisances to that usergroup. I've then added the following code to the headinclude of each style.
<if condition="$bbuserinfo['usergroupid'] == XX">
<meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=http://www.myenemy.com">
</if>

Change XX to the usergroup number you've just created.
['usergroupid'] == XX">
Change the following address to wherever you want these people/bots redirected to.
http://www.myenemy.com

Add them to the new usergroup, delete their posts and enjoy a laugh too.

This will only work for Humans using Browsers or scripts running on platforms that use browser modules. If a bot is written to scrape and parse a page it might be written to only handle the details that matter. Certain HTML tags will be stripped from being parsed and the Meta tag could well be one of them.

Currently I'm trying to work out how to do a better version using a PHP header() entry. Where the redirect could either be to a page outside of the domain or to a folder that has a .htaccess file with DENY ALL set. (Redirecting to that folder with a .htaccess would allow configuration from the .htaccess file in regards to redirects or webserver logging)

Is it possible for a php script to edit .htaccess?