Banning a member also bans other members

[bosswhite]

I am running SMF 2.0.5

I applied a ban to a member with his username and email address as ban triggers. I did not include his IP address as other members share this address.

Having recently transferred to SMF a lot of members carried over from my previous forum software have not yet logged in since changing to SMF so, currently, their IP address is logged as 0.0.0.0 (as is their hostname).

The problem is that by banning a person and not including his IP address (as mentioned above) ALL members with a current IP address of 0.0.0.0 are also banned.

How can I overcome this?

[Arantor]

There is no reason that the ban should affect them if you did not include an IP ban... sounds like you did actually apply a ban to 0.0.0.0.

[bosswhite]

No.

Since reading your reply I have performed the following:

I removed the ban from the ban list and then set a new ban against the user.

The only boxes I had checked were username and email address but when I looked at the member list, after applying the ban, once again all members with an IP address of 0.0.0.0 were also banned.

Edit:
Also when looking under Administration Center » Ban List » Browse Ban Triggers and selecting IP addressess, 0.0.0.0 is not listed as a blocked IP address.

Is it possible that if the IP address and Hostname fields contain a null value that SMF assigns 0.0.0.0, because it obviously did that when data was transferred from my previous forum software?

[Angelina Belle]

That does not sound like the intended behavior of SMF.
If that is truly what is happening, this sounds like a bug.

[Oldiesmann]

It's not really a bug because you should never have a situation where the IP is 0.0.0.0. The reason this is happening is that SMF stores "0" for each digit of the IP in the database if you don't ban an IP. Since we're not expecting a "0.0.0.0" IP address, SMF simply checks the member's IP against what's in the database.

Are the users in question unable to login at all, or are you just seeing the info in their profile saying that they're banned?

I believe that the ban check on login just checks their current IP, not what's logged in the database.

If users are unable to login at all when they have an IP of 0.0.0.0, then you should be able to remedy the situation by adding a ban on 0.0.0.1 (or something similar) to the existing ban.

[bosswhite]

Are the users in question unable to login at all, or are you just seeing the info in their profile saying that they're banned?

I believe that the ban check on login just checks their current IP, not what's logged in the database.

I can't answer that fully, I'm afraid. Yes, I am seeing the info in their profile saying that they're banned
The users who currently have 0.0.0.0 in the database as their IP are members who were transferred when I changed to SMF but have not logged in since making the change so, until one of them tried to do so, I do not know the outcome.

Is there any way I could test that? Perhaps attempt to login as one of them (username only) or would it need a password and click the submit button before it said the user was banned?

One othe issue though, was that I tried applying the ban with the user's IP address but it still reports a ban on users with 0.0.0.0 as their address.

[Angelina Belle]

I think Oldiesmann has the simplest workaround to your problem -- use an IP of 0.0.0.1 in conjunction with non-IP bans, and continue this practice until nearly all your users have posted again.

I think I have to agree with Oldiesmann that this is not actually a bug.  It is a software feature that seems to perform exactly as designed. 
The problem is a small flaw in the design.  It turns out that there is at least one case that results in 0.0.0.0 being on the database already, is association with valid posts.

Changing this behavior, then, would be a feature request for the next major version of SMF.