Users are suddenly banned

[klink]

We will be unable to provide you any support until you restore the SMF copyright to your site.  It is currently hidden with a style="display:none"... this is not allowed under the terms of the SMF License; the copyright must always be visible and remain unaltered.

I'm sorry, I thought this would be in the global.css file, but it's not there.  Can you tel me which file to check?

[klink]

Even though I'm not legal yet,  I wanted to come back here and let you know how we resolved this problem.  It might be a problem for other people and I think you should know about it.

On Tuesday our admin noticed porn spammer posting on our forum.  He got up a couple of posts, she deleted them and banned him while he was still logged on.  She mentally noted the name and the fact that he had 2 IPs.  She banned him on user name and IPs.

When we started having these problems, I had her look back through the logs.  She found the IP of said porn spammer with hundreds of hits.  She opened up a second window and could see that every single time someone tried to access the forum, his IP would register another hit.  In the meantime, all of those users received banned messages. 

Essentially, from what we can tell, from the moment we banned porn spammer's IP, every guest and user trying to login received a ban message.  As soon as we deleted his IP from the ban list, everyone has access again.  The only exception was that people who stay logged in all the time had no problem getting in. 

[kat]

Thanks for sharing that, Klink.


Marked as "Solved". 

[SlammedDime]

We will be unable to provide you any support until you restore the SMF copyright to your site.  It is currently hidden with a style="display:none"... this is not allowed under the terms of the SMF License; the copyright must always be visible and remain unaltered.

I'm sorry, I thought this would be in the global.css file, but it's not there.  Can you tel me which file to check?

It'll be in Themes/[yourtheme]/index.template.php, just do a search for 'copyright' in that file and you should be able to find the code.

[klink]

Thanks for sharing that, Klink.


Marked as "Solved". 

Although my problem is resolved, isn't the fact that it happened a problem with the system?