[siko]

hello there,

I currently run a forum much like your own here. I have had a member which i banned ages ago who will not go away and has made "puppet" accounts. He claims to work for a company where he has access to several hundred ips. I have banned at least 13 ips, however he has claimed that he has at least 399 ip addresses to use. Frankly im sick of this guy and would like to ban him forever. Any suggestions?...if it helps i run an invision free forum.

thx
siko

[jbcalg]

tough one
- can you ban all or part of a range based on the IPs you've already seen?
- does he use the same email addy (ban that)
- do you require validation for new accounts, slow that down to admin approval (a large pain depending on new registrations daily)

- really fed up? email abuse or legal at the IP owner's site or address, provide details of what this person is doing on company time/resources

[thecoalman]

Are they all coming from the same range? Such as xxx.xxx.xxx.123 and xxx.xxx.xxx.321?

If so and ban the range, I'm not familiar with invision but banning xxx.xxx.xxx.* would ban all ip's that start with xxx.xxx.xxx in phpbb. You can also ban it with htaccess. open up notepad and add the following:

order allow,deny 
deny from xxx.xxx.xxx
allow from all

Save and upload to your site and make sure it's named .htaccess It has to be somewhere in the path to you forum folder. You can save it dirtectly to the forum folder. That will ban any ip that starts with xxx.xxx.xxx

The last suggestion above is far better, companies usually are not to happy to find out their employees are abusing their system especially if they are using it to harass someone. If it was my employee his *** would be fired on the spot.

In the end though if the person is persistent there is many ways to get around most ifnot all of the things you can do such as using a open proxy server, in that case you'd just have to ignore them and hope they go away.

[siko]

does he use the same email addy (ban that)

nope he changes it every time.

do you require validation for new accounts, slow that down to admin approval (a large pain depending on new registrations daily)

tried that. it doesnt do any good, it delays progress of the forum member wise, plus he isnt obvious, so he can make a 'puppet' that seems legit.

really fed up? email abuse or legal at the IP owner's site or address, provide details of what this person is doing on company time/resources

dont know what company he works for.

Are they all coming from the same range? Such as xxx.xxx.xxx.123 and xxx.xxx.xxx.321?

nope, if it was that easy i wouldnt be here.

they are completely random such has with ips such as 69.xxx.xxx.xxx, 66.xxx.xxx.xxx, 12.xxx.xxx.xxx, 150.xxx.xxx.xxx. He uses 69, 66, 12, and 150 most of the time(that i know of) with all of the other 9 Xs having completely random numbers.

siko

[thecoalman]

What about banning free email accounts like those from yahoo, gmail? In phpbb you can just use a wildcard and ban all registrations from a domain such as yahoo. Pain in the butt for legitimate users that want to register but you can't hide if it's a isp mail account. You could just do it temporarily then lift after a few weeks, by that time he'll have given up.

Originally Posted by siko

they are completely random such has with ips such as 69.xxx.xxx.xxx, 66.xxx.xxx.xxx, 12.xxx.xxx.xxx, 150.xxx.xxx.xxx. He uses 69, 66, 12, and 150 most of the time(that i know of) with all of the other 9 Xs having completely random numbers.

if they are all random like that I think you're out of luck because he's probably using a proxy server. You can look up who the ip is assigned too here: http://www.arin.net/ Or just google the IP in quotes. If it's a open proxy server you'll quickly find out using google.

I know there is a mod for phpbb for blocking registrations coming from open proxies but I can't help you with invision. You can do it through htaccess but you would need a list of known ip's.

[tramaco]

I spoke with a (not too knowledgeable tech support person) in an ISP, and she told me that the IP changes periodically for everybody, that there is a dynamic IP and a static IP, for particular types of customers. I can't believe that, but that is what she said. I have been tracking my own IP and it hasn't changed in 6 weeks. So there it is.

I check it with cmd (ip)
ipconfig

[Squashman]

If his IP is changing that drastically then he is using a Proxy to come into your site. I would say he is using something like Tor.

[thecoalman]

Originally Posted by tramaco

that there is a dynamic IP and a static IP, for particular types of customers. I can't believe that, but that is what she said.

That depends on your type of connection and your ISP. For dial-up evertime you reconnect it's going to be a different IP but they aren't going to change much. Mostly the last three numbers. If you're on cable/dsl it won't change unless you get disconnected and even then some cable ISP's assign an IP to a customer so even when they reconnect it's still the same. In my case it changes...

[Eriksrocks]

How many members do you have? You might have to just get creative, like sending out a PM to all your members and then moving the forum to a different directory so he can't find it.

Otherwise confront him and maybe try to squeeze some information out of him, see what you can do with it.

You could just disable registrations until he gives up.

[john1]

You could try resolving your beef with this person.
His actions clearly require some effort on his behalf.
He is not acting like this for nothing.

Settle. Come to terms. The eventually the troubles
start to matter more than the rights and wrongs of
the situation.

John

[brendandonhu]

Can you post one of the IPs he uses? If you can find out what proxy list he's using you might be able to ban more of them.

[Eriksrocks]

Originally Posted by john1

You could try resolving your beef with this person.
His actions clearly require some effort on his behalf.
He is not acting like this for nothing.

Settle. Come to terms. The eventually the troubles
start to matter more than the rights and wrongs of
the situation.

John

I don't think that would work. He's probably just some jerk that wants to create trouble, has no reason, has no life, just has some problems.

[dvk01]

tramaco

I've removed your off topic political rant

if you want to discuss politics then Civ debate is the place NOT any PC help forum

[sn1p34]

With PHP you can get the ip hidden behind the proxy, then you can ban that ip.

[brendandonhu]

That will only work if the proxy sends HTTP_FORWARDED_FOR, which most don't.