[Marco van Herwaarden]

An IP-ban is usefull if you have 1 returning visitor on a fixed IP that will not try to avoid the ban by using proxies. It can also be used to block entire countries, but a .htaccess is better suitable for that.

But i see many boards with endless lists of IP's probably adding the IP of each banned user, which is useless, uses a lot of extra memory (is stored in the datastore and loaded on each page into memory), impossible to maintain/administer and open for typo's.

If usefull then for subnets, but hardly for individual IP's. But this is a personal opinion.