A big key to that is to reject free email sign ups, because it makes it just painful enough for them to sign up another shill that it's more work for them to find a new unbanned free email provider than for you to ban them.

If you can shift the work so that they pay a higher price to come back in time and energy than you do to ban them then they get tired before you do.

It does limit participation a little as some legit members would like to sign up with their yahoo or gmail account, but I've found that it hasn't been that much of an impediment.

LOL Sirdude, I LOVE that!

Well, I'm ultimately sure solutions exist in IIS and Apache, but I'm relatively certain that you can block anonymous proxy servers from accessing your server (ultimately banning specific well known ports from originating); hell, you may even be able to do this from iptables in linux

How do you do that, Giz?

It'd require full root access; which I doubt just about anyone has...

But I'm certain there are several apache modules, as well as iptables rules (which can block source ports) and likely several daemon's.

Well if you can't use a free e-mail account then that would boot me from a dozen sites.

<snicker> your isp doesn't give you an email account? you don't have one from a domain you own? yeh, you'd be screwed ;)...

We used to ban AOL ;0

Yes I have from both, but I don't normally use them. No sense in every site spamming me at those locations.

In fact I don't even check mail on my ISP account. Nothing in there but SPAM as I've never given it out to anyone or used it.

Just pointing out that there are people that just won't join your site if they can't use a free mail account, or unless you have something to offer that they really want and can't find somewhere else.

agreed, but if you're "under attack" by preteens with nothing better to do, not many choices

:ooks like someone could make some $$$ by creating a list of free email domains and another list of IP's used by anonymous prozy servers, torrify, etc...