Administrative and Maintenance Tools - Advanced Ipban Manager

What does this do?
This is intended as a replacement for the ip bans under vbulletin options. It allows for timed ip bans, cidr ranges and attatching reasons to bans.

It also features registration only ip bans allowing members who may be effected by an ip ban to continue using the forums, but blocking registrations and ip ban exempts so that you can ban a large range of ips and let through a smaller subset of them.

What can I use it for?
This is a much better tool for managing ip bans on your forums. As it has its own permissions, you can grant admins access to it without needing them to have full access to the vbulletin settings. For more details see the features list.

Features

• A new interface, separate to the options for adding and removing ip bans.
• Set expiry dates and reasons for ip bans
• See who set which ip bans
• Set ip bans by cidr range.
• Set registration only ip bans (great for stopping spam bots without affecting existing forum users)
• Set exempt ip bans (ban a large range of ips and only allow select ips through the ban)
• Define unbannable ips in config.php
• A range of tools for assisting usage including:
  • Cidr to range calculator (see what range a certain ban will affect)
  • Range to cidr calculator (creates a set of bans to cover any arbitrary range [experimental]
  • Test an ip (enter an ip to see if its banned or not and which if any bans affect it)
  • Whois an ip (get information on who owns (eg which isp) an ip and the cidr range of ips that they own (simplifying blocking users on dynamic ips)) [Dependant on host and server OS]
  • Check if a user is banned (enter a username/userid to see if they are banned or not)

Planned features

• Ban a user (some sort of integration and automation to ip ban users from their admincp profile)
• Integration with delete as spam feature to allow automatically ip banning spammers
• Inport/Export ip bans to share with others and amongst other sites you own
• Os independent whois and results parsing (eg give novice admins a hand in picking out the important bits)
• Automatic conversion from old bans into new ones.
• Phrases for admincp areas (that are currently lacking them)
• Integrated Admin help

Installation
1. Backup db.
2. Upload files from zip.
3. Import product file.
4. Setup admin permissions for your staff.

Upgrading from 3.6+ version of this mod
1. Backup db
2. Use the uninstall option for the 3.6 version of this product. (this will leave your ip bans in tact)
3. Upload the new files from the zip, overwriting the old ones
4. Import the new product file.
5. Check admin permissions for your staff members.

Upgrading from previous versions of this mod
1. Upload files in upload directory
2. Import product (allowing override)

Uninstallation
1. Backup db.
2. Uninstall the product file.
3. Manually delete the ipbans table from your database (unless you want to keep it)
4. Delete the files that were included with this release.

Changelog

• 4.0-0.4 rc1
  • Changed min cidr range from 16 to 8.
  • Added md5 sums file, ipban manger will no longer come up as suspect files in diagnostics (unless someone has tampered with the files)
  • Added feature to check if a user is banned
• 4.0-0.4 b2 (unreleased)
  • Fixed a couple of minor bugs
    • Redirecting to the wrong place after adding an ip ban
    • Short php tag at top of admincp file
• 4.0-0.4 b1
  • Added tool to calculate cidrs from an arbitary range
  • Fixed product help and version check urls
• 4.0-0.4 a2
  • Fixed bug with admincp menu not showing
• 4.0-0.4 a1
  • initial release

Notes

• See https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=186342 this thread for 3.6+ version and some guides on usage.

[tommythejoat]

We have about 3400 ip wild card strings in the settings ip bans. I was wondering if there has been any progress on an import facility.

One difficult issue seems to be recognizing contiguous ip bans that cannot be expressed in the vBulletin wild card format and making them into cidr addresses.

It is a bit of coding, but it looks like one could just take the values from the settings table and convert them to entries in the ipbans table.

I tried doing it with an Excel spreadsheet and decided it would be much easier to program it in php. However, it is more work than I would want to do if it is already being done by someone.

I found a much better bulk ip to cidr calculator than the one included in the product. It's notation is different from the vB notation also (of course). The calculator is located at http://ip2cidr.com/bulk-ip-to-cidr-converter.php.

I really wish this product accepted the standard cidr notation and accepted bulk input.

All in all the ability to have exempt ip's is a critically needed benefit and I really like the product.

[MacGuyInNC]

Does anyone have this working on 4.1.12? I'd love to implement this and block a lot of the problematic regions with which my forum will not have any dealings.

[MacGuyInNC]

Upgraded my site to 4.2. Can anyone confirm whether this works?

[Carnage]

It works well on 4.1.12; don't know about 4.2 as i'm not running that version.

[DAMINK]

Does not appear to work for me..... Well im not 100% sure.
I have for example one ip address banned.
Yet i still get daily registration attempts that get trapped by a timer delay during registration.

I wonder. does this mod wait until registration is complete before denying the registration or at the point the ip address hits the server?
If the latter then it does not appear to be working for me.

I am running Latest version available: 4.2.0 Patch Level 3

I do have a few other mods in place and are working through those as possible conflicts as i type this but felt i would notify the community of my findings.

Thanks DAMINK.

[HolyKiller]

I can confirm that the mod works fine on 4.2.2 PL1

[nchristoph]

Is there an similar mod for VB 5 or will this one be ported over?

[ozzy47]

Nothing for vB5 yet. There is very few mods for vB5.