Monitor or log certain activity?

[Steven W Hill]

I have a very large membership-required forum, which inevitably means the occasional troublemaker who gets banned for rulebreaking and then keeps signing up with new accounts with each successive ban. IP bans, even bans on ranges, are only helpful if they're always coming in on that range, but naturally they don't always do that.

Searching for IP matches is limited only to registration IPs and post IPs, which means if they register for the nth time, and never post, the only IP I can search on is their registration IP.

So, here's my question.

Is there a hack/mod, or maybe a cron job, to do any of the following things:
1. Monitor a specific thread and keep a log of who is viewing it
2. Monitor the forum for all accesses coming from a particular IP address or range
3. Monitor a specific member for the threads they view
4. Anything else that might aid in catching a returning banned member

All ideas considered!

[Steven W Hill]

Okay, let's try something simpler, maybe...

Is there any way (perhaps an SQL query?) to generate a list of all IP addresses logged in at runtime? Something like the "Who's Online" list, which of course shows all the IP addresses, but in a bit more useful/accessible output? (I can't spend time copying and pasting text from 12 pages of logged-in users every time I want to find out if someone is presently using a particular IP.)