Problem with forum trolls

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11-07-2005, 12:11 AM
Rostum

Problem with forum trolls

Well, as you can see in my signiture, we have a forum for our small linkshell community in FFXI. It is a great linkshell.

Lately, we've had a problem with a member who decided to leave, steal and be an immature bastard to most of our members. And now he's deciding to troll our forums.

We've blocked his IP address, but he got in again, so we blocked it again. But now we're not really sure how to go about keeping him out?

It's just an invision-free forum though, so I don't know if we're limited to something like this. We do know that he has a comcast IP, and were thinking of contacting his ISP and seeing if they can help us out to stop him.

Please help. ^^
11-07-2005, 12:42 AM
Shoeberto

Try turning off registration temporarily, if that's possible. It may help.
11-07-2005, 01:23 AM
Samuraid

Make all registrations activated by administrator only. That way you can do some screening of new signups and hopefully reject him if he tries to join again.
11-07-2005, 01:37 AM
Rostum

Thank you for the help. ^^
11-07-2005, 02:26 AM
Meat Puppet

Have you tried banning his entire country?
11-07-2005, 02:37 AM
Rostum

Um, all of America?
11-07-2005, 04:44 AM
Yamaneko

Ban the IP range instead of the specific IP.
11-08-2005, 12:38 AM
Dr Unne

IP banning isn't foolproof. You can fake your IP address. You can fake anything. Best bet is to annoy him so much that he quits on his own. Require email addresses for registration (so they need to get a new one every time you ban them), and hand-moderate new registrations (most MBs let you do this). Wait 2 or 3 days before you approve any new members. Innocent new members who really want to join won't mind the wait, they only wait once. But multi-registering trolls will be considerably slowed down and annoyed, especially if you're quick to find and ban them once they start posting.

Thankfully most trolls don't seem very bright. An intelligent and persistent troll can be pretty annoying.

EDIT: Instead of banning, maybe you could use some .htaccess files in creative ways. Redirect everyone from certain IPs to some other site. Or give them a 404. Or serve them an entirely different dummy copy of your site. They probably wouldn't see that coming.
11-08-2005, 01:29 AM
Shoeberto

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dr Unne

EDIT: Instead of banning, maybe you could use some .htaccess files in creative ways. Redirect everyone from certain IPs to some other site. Or give them a 404. Or serve them an entirely different dummy copy of your site. They probably wouldn't see that coming.

IPBFree, Unne ;) I'm doubting he's allowed to play around with any advanced Apache functions.
11-08-2005, 01:50 AM
ZeZipster

IP Banning is downright useless if they're using AOL or other dial-up services because their IP addy changes every time they disconnect. Unne's advice is your best choice... If you're going to ban an IP-range, be careful you don't ban an entire ISP, especially not one like AOL.
11-08-2005, 11:07 PM
o_O

Quote:

Originally Posted by Meat Puppet

Have you tried banning his entire country?

xD

A few years ago there was a troll on my board, so we put him on invisible mode: he could see everyone's posts and reply and such, but no other members could see anything he posted - like he was invisible. It was great for a laugh and drove him away as soon as he realised nobody was paying any attention to him. :p
11-09-2005, 05:23 AM
crono_logical

Sounds a bit like the Tachy goes to Coventry option you get for vBulletin :p