ip/user banning Emergency?

[Talisman]

We do understand, aveon. As acidburn said, that's a problem we've all had to deal with and we know what a hassle this is. But if someone is reasonably tech-minded and determined to keep changing IP addresses, email accounts, and uses anonymous surfing tools/proxies to get back to your site ... then you can't effectively ban him or her forever.

As a temporary measure, you can wipe out that person's regional area by using global IP banning (as in banning the first few number sets of their IP string). For example, if your pest uses IP addresses that always trace back to wannado.fr -- then ban all the IP ranges registered to that provider for a limited period of time and HOPE he/she decides to give up and -- maybe -- goes off to hassle someone else. Just remember to remove those bans later on because nobody else using that provider can visit your site then, either. In the long run, this hurts your community, plus the fact that your focus is still directed toward this problem and not where it needs to be as a site admin/community leader.

Even resorting to this sort of 'drastic' level of banning, though, won't ensure he/she can't come back. Your troublemaker can still get past this ban if they know how. You truly cannot stop someone who wants get back in by banning them, alone.

What you can do to eventually stop the pest is to implement a few different measures that will make it harder and less satisfying for them to continue their fight.

1. Use the "miserable users" hack. That defeats the purpose for them to register new accounts over and over to get in because they THINK they have a valid account registered now that you didn't shut down, yet. Set the time-outs and error messages to be not very severe to start with. And post a few messages to the full membership saying you've heard complaints about server problems -- ask them to let you know if they experience problems logging on or viewing the site. Mention that you keep trying to resolve the server problem. This makes you come across as friendly, welcoming, and helpful all the while you're misleading your pest into thinking you don't know he/she is still there. (No damage done here.) Then gradually increase the errors/time-out to a point that he almost never gets through. It takes time, but this truly works.

2. If you have a group that's reasonably active and is large enough to sustain itself, then close the site to new member registrations for a month (or so). Invite visiting guests to check back later when you will be accepting new members, again. (This is rather drastic and can hurt the community badly if it's a new-ish community that can't live without new members for a while. If your community is really hot and in great demand, though... it won't harm anything doing this for short periods.) In the mean time, your pest might move on to play his/her games elsewhere and forget to come back after you.

3. If you moderate all new member accounts, this gives you time to examine new registrant's IP address, config data, email domains, and such BEFORE you give them access to post, pm, view, etc.

Try all the measures you can to make this too difficult for him/her to keep coming back in combination with each other and it will work... eventually.

Good luck, aveon. And let us know how this works out for you.