Rose: Yes, the fallout from banning a member from your forums can be dizasterous at times... Reguardless of if your community actually LIKED the person the attitude can be devistating even up to the days resulting from and after the event...

I banned 6 at the same time
Took them down and we are still here to tell the tail

Since they went (The Mouth Squad) everything became
harmony again, well after a few weeks lol.

Out of the six bans ranged from 6 weeks to 6 months.
And 3 of them now are loyal members

Strange old world.


link kink kinky

Well, at our community, I was one of the founding members, another of us was basically made an admin and was running things when I left...

I came back years later, and ended up buying the community; he seemed to think it was his but the owner saw otherwise...

Well, to make a long story short, I gave him the oppertunity to keep his post, but without server level access to the site due to my security policies... he flipped out, and I destaffed him...

I left his "friends" as staff, but they all decided to create another site to compete with ours and where stealing memers... so I banned the whole lot of them...

Giz, I'm having a similar problem at the moment. A couple of people who were unhappy at my community got one of those nasty out-of-the-box forums and opened an opposition site, calling themselves the Castaways (none of them had been banned or anything). They also tried to recruit members from my site, but after about six weeks they haven't managed to coax anyone yet. They have five members in total.

I guess it's not really a problem, because my site is very well established and I can't really call them competition, but it's very strange behaviour. I could care less about the competition, but I hate that they try to recruit my members.

'eh I find it as this, they're being a menace and sending advertisements to my members who do not wish to recieve spam, so in ridding my community of spammers I'm saving them from harassment...

We used to call our competition site our Recycle Bin
where all the idiots or banned members went after us lol

We often joked that we were happy to have that site
there as it kept all the crap away from us

And it does lol.

Lol, interesting way of things... The bad part was, when these competition sites poped up, it was generaly valueable members who went trying to make a name for themselves; so a lot of useful information took off with them :/

Mark, you are so right!! That's another reason why it doesn't bother me too much. In fact it's a happy thing, right?

The problem is that you can not really ban a troll. They keep on coming back for more

I have a few trolls on my board and they look like an army to the rest of the community... they use multiple ID's... anonymous proxy servers... you name it... they know how to delete cookies so they double ID' detectors do not pick them up

I am like Gizmo... ban them and case closed but it isn ot really closed... sometimes I only set them to read only so it takes longer for them to come back and do not have to register a new account is they only wanted to read

The idea is not to loose members...

Banning people is not so good as setting people to read only... as that does not get them so upset... and a comeback cvan be negotiated...

Have set my board not to allow members to PM before they make a certain number of posts. Takes some efort to post before they can Spam by PM... also have the board set so you have to wait a day or two before you can post...

Been using a lot of mods on 6.5 and not upgrading to 7.2 and wsnting to know what is available for Spam control for 7.2

I have tryed it all...

Had my share of members leaving ot create their own boards and and try to take our members with them... that is the way of the net, the world... top cats want their own... which sucks for board owner being hit by Spam... but it also a good indicator that other want what you have. After many years running boards I am still not sure what makes a community tick and prosper...

But no community want to loose their top posters to other communities...

I feel I need a better double ID's checker and a better way to check and match IP's, and ban IP's...

rather than ban and if the alcatraz route hasn't yet worked, i'll also just put them into the "Moron group", where a board hack will choose from an array of pre-defined posts. Regardless of what they type and 'Submit', the addpost/editpost routine will instead pick from (for example)

1. i'm an idiot
2. yeppers, marbles are sharper than i am
3. holy crap, i'm a moron
...

etc..

they can edit or whatever, but still end up with a randomly generated string of idiotic stuff.

when their sockpuppets reappear, they get lumped into that group..

i find that they eventually tire and give up.. all the same time providing entertainment for the onlookers..

:2c: