Banned myself & cannot access forum I administrate!

[mermaidmarion]

Hi there,

When discovering some spam, I as forum administrator banned the spamming users with their IP-addresses and seem to have banned myself in the process. When I or any other member of the forum tries to log in, this message appears:

An Error Has Occurred!
Sorry Guest, you are banned from using this forum!

hxxp:the%20forum%20url%20is%20http://forum.coill.net/ [nonactive]
using SMF 1.1.11

I would be very grateful for any help with this problem.
Thank you kindly,
Marion

[HDB]

Use a friend's computer that is on a different IP address to gain access to the forum. From a different IP you should be able to log into the forum as the Admin and unban your IP.

[mermaidmarion]

Thanks for your swift reply! Unfortunately, this does not seem to do the trick. Even when I log on from a completely different computer that I have never before used to access the forum, the error message comes up 

Any other suggestions very much appreciated!
Cheers,
Marion

[Kindred]

1- you should never use SMF to ban IPs...   in general, using a large number of bans is a bad idea anyway... but banning by IP is a particularly bad idea for several reasons....   you can catch unexpected groups of real users, banning in SMF slows down your whole system. If you feel that you absolutely must ban someone by IP then use an htaccess ban.

2- Go into your hosting cpanel, access the database in phpmyadmin find the smf_log_bans table (or, it might be the smf_ban_items table)

find your IP, user ID or host and delete that row...

[kat]

Failing those, try accessing your forum via here...

http://anonymouse.org/anonwww.html

[Ninja ZX-10RR]

After the serious answers can i just be snarky and laugh? xD

Btw you could also try the Tor browser, you would get a result pretty much similar to K@'s method.

[mermaidmarion]

Hi there,

and thanks so much to Kindred, K@ and Flavio93Zena for additional tips (and for the laughter, I did have a good snortle at myself, yes!).

It seems that the IP-address is not the crux of the problem, as logging on from another IP-address or with anonymised IP doesn't help either, all users of the forum seem categorically banned

I am now trying to get the person who initially helped me set up the domain to get me into the CPanel. Could be a good opportunity to back the forum up, I guess 

So again thanks, and will bother you again if all fails ....
(Sheepish) Marion

[Kindred]

Sounds like you made a classic mistake and banned a whole series of ip addresses...

[Ninja ZX-10RR]

2- Go into your hosting cpanel, access the database in phpmyadmin find the smf_log_bans table (or, it might be the smf_ban_items table)

find your IP, user ID or host and delete that row...

You're welcome and yeah i guess this one is your best bet let us know if you sort it out!