[peterska2]

/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.