Baning users

[The Eerie Network]

Hi all, how do I ban users? I've got this person who is causing a little bit too much trouble and I want to ban them, however I have no idea how to do this, I'm using vBulletin, thank you.

[Nicky]

Find your user via your admin panel, choose to edit their setting and change their user group to BANNED.

[James]

In my experience there is no reliable way to ban someone - they can always get around it. For example, on Nicky's solution I've had several difficult users who just go and register under a different name.
If I ban by IP, then they use a different ISP. If I ban their email, they get another one.

What I would do is make sure you have email validation on (as this should slow them down a bit), then just keep banning them if they reregister (if they don't then you're lucky ). I once had a user who reregistered over 30 times in a week.

If you're having real major problems you could also temporarily disable registrations, with a message about why and an email address to send registration requests to - but only use this as a last resort as it's not really a good idea.

[The Eerie Network]

Nicky, Thank you, I did not have a user group called Banned, so I created on and set everything to off

James, I just home that this does not happen to me

[Nicky]

James is right, but not a lot of people might want to got to all that trouble so banning them in the first instance might deter most people.

[iFroggy]

Yeah... it seems like everyone I ban goes around it. I ban their username and then their IP. But every time they come, they have a drastically different IP.

Lots of idiots out there, thats for sure.

[Steve_S]

In vB 2.x

1) Create a new user group for your Banned members

2) Set permissions for this user group appropriately. They can't post etc.

3) Move the abusive member to this user group. Do not deleate the member.

Other thoughts: Consider moderating all new members. Consider banning all free email addresses and free domains for folks that wish to register. Admin has an optiin so this won't effect your current members.


I hope this helps in some way.

[The Eerie Network]

Thank you for the advice.