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.

[aveon]

no luck guys i tried ewerythink i can i cant shut down site for registering because i dont have many members this guy keep writing those messages and then he is making my users unconfortable if vbulletin doesnt have anything to keep out these kind of guys its to bad i cant keep trackin this guy down for ewer but im sure he wont stop doing it what can i do nothing farewell thanx to all of you for your helps

[Kirk Y]

It's not just vBulletin. You could go get Invision, phpBB, Mambo, etc, and you'll still have the same problem. There is just no way to permanently ban a technically saavy person from a website, or forum as the case may be.

The only other option that I can think of is if you can get this guy's IP Address and hostname then try calling/emailing his Internet Provider. Detail to them all of spam posts that he's been generating on your forum and what not. Most likely they'll take action that will, AFAIK, make it more difficult for him to access your website.

[slappy]

How many New Registered Users do you have on an average day? You could always send all New User's Posts, until they have X number of Posts, to the Moderation Que and then his posts (as a New User) would never make it into the Threads.

In one of the Forums I administer, NO New Registered User's Posts appear until I approve them personally and they go into the Moderation Que until they have 3 "approved" Posts. Guests are not allowed to Post.

You can rename your 'Registered Users' usergroup to 'Newbies' (or whatever you want). To have all posts of this usergroup moderated. Set 'Follow Forum Moderation Rules' in the Usergroup -> Forum Viewing Permissions -> 'Follow Forum Moderation Rules -> No. You can then automatically move users to a second usergroup that's not moderated using a Usergroup Promotion after X posts.

So if you don't have too many New Registered Users each day, you can moderate all their new posts and this "problem" user can not keep re-registering and posting before you can catch his posts. After you have approved Three Posts (or however many you want) the "newly registered users" are automatically promoted into a non-automatically moderated status.

Regards,

[Borgs8472]

^ ^
agreed. And considering banning temporily the email domains they're signing up with, e.g. hotmail.

[TMM-TT]

Originally Posted by aveon

i dont need to make him think something i need to ban him for ever that he can never go into the site again thanx

Does the trolltracker meet your requirements?

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=119695

You can also ban IP's directly via apache/.htaccess.

http://www.clockwatchers.com/htaccess_block.html

As a side note, you do realize just how rude you're being when people keep offering you help and you respond that you're looking for "good coders" instead of the many solutions already presented to you, right? There is no big red button that you can just push to solve all of your problems. You're going to have to learn to run vBulletin and your webserver, period. I normally wouldn't say anything like this but the last time I helped you, you did the same thing.

[aveon]

yo man im sorry but if there was a bully like the one in my site at your site you wold do the same think lilt bit more understandind and youll get what im meaning ok thanx for your helps mates

[Gunshot]

its not that difficult

you just have to be as relentless as they are and use a multi-pronged counter attack

ban usernames, emails, ban Ips at the software and the server, use tachy goes to coventry, complain to his ISP

definately use "miserable users"......this is very powerful

I like redirecting them to some nasty websites with harmful scripts.....i have also redirected them to test sites and put them into "miserable" there also....they keep pinging back and forth.

if you keep after them they will give up

remember.....if they are using proxy's it means their browser will be loading painfully slow and posting is like pulling teeth...so if you immediately take them out they have to start over

[TMM-TT]

We have a few users that in some reason doesn't like us that always coming back after a while when they got banned. They are sneaking around and doesn't do anything except for annoying us. If we could prevent that banned users can't reach the site at all, they won't be able to register new accounts either. The trolltracker linked above got a new function yesterday that works like ipbanning, but instead of trying to track down a banned user and ban their ip's, it checks users/guest against the built in banlist. If there's a match, it doesn't matter if the user is a guest or logged in - they can't see anything except "You're banned" and why they were banned.