I recently banned two accounts by username, IP and email address. They are full bans. I noticed today they are listed as having logged on in the users online today area...in the error logs I see that they have been getting the banned messages...but I've never noticed a banned user appear in that "online today" area. Is something funky going on or is this normal?
Visits from banned members here (mostly ip bans in my case) does appear in the online list as 'Viewing the board index of *', which shows they've been connecting to the forum, but not getting anywhere and can do nothing due to the ban (I use the redirect customization, sending them to load a 50 mb jpg form a very slow server in china. Love it. And of course, the ban hit appears in the ban log (but due to the redirect it stays out of the error log).
So afaik, what you describe seems normal, what you see in logs + users online is the (failed) attempt to get into the forum.