What banned users see

[Zanno]

I've had problem users on DSL ranges that are entire /16 ranges. I can't ban them by IP, because the next day they can have a new address, and I can't ban the ranges from which they post because then I'll block legitimate users.

have you tried flaming them out of the forum

[Aldenhier]

But, surely the advantage of banning users is the ability to ban their ip. Otherwise they enjoy coming back and trying to torment you even more.

Just putting them all in one group doesn't achieve this.

That too! I like the suggestion about the other forum for banned only, but it really doesn't work to well.

In IPB, they have a permission group called "Banned". You can set the permissions for that group to see certain forums and stuff, and the way to add people to the group, is to simply ban them. Get it?

-Aldenhier

[monotek]

if a user is banned.
can he read or write pm´s?
i think he should, beacause to get in contact to the board admin...

[DragonlordP]

on the other hand, this way a spammer would be able to spam through pms (has happened at my forum)

[blobber]

The whole banning thing is entirely theoretical and essentially -unfortunately- pointless, I mean about 12 months ago we tried to use it quite extensively on several users who were trying to annoy the whole forum, very soon we learned that "banning" does acutally only work for those folks who really haven't been using the internet for much longer than a week.

Everybody else either knows how to circumvent a ban or how to obtain the required information (i.e. google), there isn't any practical way to really ban a particular user:

• if you ban their account they register new ones
• if you ban their email address, they register new ones
• if you ban their ip address, they either don't notice it because they're on dial up, or they simply use a proxy
• we even had to start blocking proxy servers and anonymizers
• if you ban IP ranges (ISP,proxy,anonymizers), you'll ban hundreds of other potential users
• then some offenders started using free dial up services to access the forum
  
  etc...

Essentially, banning works only for those folks who really don't know much about web technologies, also we've made the experience that we banned certain (static) IPs that later turned our to stem from internet cafés or even universities that have dozens of computers/or users using the very same IP (address/pool).

What we tried meanwhile was to add some sort of "hidden ban" to users, basically such users would still see their own threads and postings and would be able to log on to the forum, but their postings and threads would only be visible to themselve, however that worked only for some time and situations because it's pointless when people are organized and try to offend a forum in groups, so that they can cross-check their postings.

So, the best things we've seen working so far is really a separate forum where we put all the garbage.