A Persistant Troll

[chrishicks]

What I did in this situation was to create a new membergroup and a hidden board. The hidden board was the only board this group could see. Then I took away almost every permission available. When I came across a spammer(close enough to a troll) they ended up in that. I even had a nice Welcome Spammers topic that they could read and nothing more. If they reregistered under another IP I'd let them be until they acted up again. Then repeat the process. They usually gave up after a few tries. Could always try something like that.

[Night09]

@ Ensiferous

If you download lists of proxies and also ban individual ip's and a small range round it your unlikely go gimp a genuine visitors ip but will seriously reduce the availablity of ip's available for spammers. Its unlikely you can block them all and I am not saying you can but it will make things a lot easier if you have a large forums where you dont have to do ip bans constantly to specific ip's

With 4,294,967,296 IPv4 alone and approx 4 billion IPv6 even with a large forum your unlikely to hinder genuine visitors from finding your site basing bans round a few from spammers.

My Backbones fine btw but thank you for your concern.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

@ Ensiferous

If you download lists of proxies and also ban individual ip's and a small range round it you...

... end up seriously damaging your server performance.

[Night09]

I have a dedicated server so not an issue but fair enough.

[Ensiferous]

With 4,294,967,296 IPv4 alone and approx 4 billion IPv6 even with a large forum your unlikely to hinder genuine visitors from finding your site basing bans round a few from spammers.

The funny thing is that I just got an email titled "Why does it say Ime banned". Spelling errors and all. AOL users are often grouped under one IP so they're very likely to share and cause chaos if you ban one of them. Granted my forum is very large, but it's not a requisite.

If you download lists of proxies and also ban individual ip's and a small range round it your unlikely go gimp a genuine visitors ip but will seriously reduce the availablity of ip's available for spammers. Its unlikely you can block them all and I am not saying you can but it will make things a lot easier if you have a large forums where you dont have to do ip bans constantly to specific ip's

Also this is instantly negated by any one using TOR. There are so many IPs available with TOR that it's down right scary, and getting a new one is just clicking a button. You might get rid of amateur users, but anyone who is going to bother with a proxy will easily figure out how to use TOR.

[mirahalo]

What I did in this situation was to create a new membergroup and a hidden board. The hidden board was the only board this group could see. Then I took away almost every permission available. When I came across a spammer(close enough to a troll) they ended up in that. I even had a nice Welcome Spammers topic that they could read and nothing more. If they reregistered under another IP I'd let them be until they acted up again. Then repeat the process. They usually gave up after a few tries. Could always try something like that.

I do the same thing   works fine.