Banning someone to access your site

Someone is accessing my site and trying to hurt it

[cocacolafun]

I have a website that is a small community. It has a few hundreds persons that login every day.

I recently banned someone.

She didn't accept it, so now, she create new accounts and post in the Forum bad things and chat and say all kind of things about me and about the community.

She uses dynamic IP address with AOL. Banning all AOL would hurt the community. She also uses some proxy sometimes.

So even if I ban her, she always come back.

Anyone have dealt with a situation like that before? What should I do? It really hurts my little business.

CCF

[jdMorgan]

Several popular forum scripts have an "invisible" setting (or plug-in) that allows unwelcome visitors to post -- and to see their own posts. But no-one else can see them.

The unwelcome visitors usually get tired of being completely ignored and find something else to do that makes better use of their time... :)

Jim

[futuresky]

You may want to contact AOL's abuse department...or contact her first and warn her you'll do this, which could get her internet connection completely terminated.

[Bewenched]

Definately ban her IP address.
Or if she is using an ISP that rotates IP address you might want to think about setting a permanent cookie on any new user accounts that way you can ban them by the cookie. Of course they can clear cookies and do it again. You could also set posts by people with that cookie value to see their own posts but no one else can. That way they will think they are doing harm, but no one else will see it but them and they think they are getting away with it. <wicked grin>

[edited by: Bewenched at 9:45 pm (utc) on Feb. 3, 2008]

[nomis5]

First, find out what has annoyed the poster, something has. Maybe, if you understand what the problem is, you can sort it out amicably.

[driller41]

Provided it is toned down a noisy/opinated person is generally what a forum needs - people like opinions and chatter, a quiet forum is a dead forum, try to placate her and use her to your advantage.

[bwnbwn]

driller41

I agree 100%

[goodsite]

There are quite a good number of people who hurt good sites. I tried a lot of keep my forum clean but again the next day...... Banning IP or name doesn' help that much.

[piatkow]

The accepted wisdom regarding people who spam forums with inappropriate postings is to just keep quietly deleting their posts until they go away. As they are after attention never acknowledge them and they will eventually get bored and go away.

That isn't perfect, some are more persistent than others. Obviously we have no idea how the membership system on your forums works or if it is your own software or a hosted service.

What you want to do is make things inconvenient enough to discourage this person from registering multiple user names without putting genuine users off. That really depends on what functionality is available with your forum. I have seen some that require a response to a confirmation email and then won't open a second account under that address while others are pretty well open house.

IP blocking is not the answer - I have seen people block themselves from their own forums before now when trying to block another customer of the same ISP.

[thecoalman]

if ($pita_member) {
$wait = rand(5, 10);
sleep($wait);
}

:)