A long time ago a company came to me that was having problems with their UBB.Classic and had asked me to build a very advanced banning system and tie it into the UBB product.
I was able to ban on AOL and other systems by identification of the user and his or her computer in those net blocks and domains without banning everyone in those net blocks and domains out right.
This could ban and track access of a single user as well as look for that user coming back in through proxies too. Now this was a hard subject between Charles formerly from Infopop and broke up that friendship. Anyhow it was made possible and worked. It has its own control panel and tied into the message board by way of a separate engine. I have never re-written the engine into PHP.
This could ban by domain name, net block, total proxy ban excluding black holes such as AOL by identifying if that person perhaps was on such a system compatible or equal to AOL, individual user in a net block, and more.
This thing would tell you how many times that user tried to access the message board and log each and every attempt. Would allow you to get their reverse DNS information and resolve their ISP domain information by the click of a button or two as well as give you so much more information. It would also look for banned users and tell you it thinks that a banned user is trying to access the message board from a totally different net block. Also in some cases such as a large corporation office user tell you their back end IP address as well.
This was all in Perl. Now many of you keep telling me in here PHP is so much better with the abilities to use a MySQL Database and much more efficient. Some day I will actually write this into PHP and run it with a MySQL Database, unless Groupee wants to give me a boat load of money to buy the rights to incorporate it into their UBB.Threads.
I had developed this to be able to run as a firewall in any Perl program or application on a web server with the abilities to do more then a standard user would ever be able to do without setting off alarms to the server administrator or being taken as a threat to the system or server.
All message boards including UBB are very lacking in the banning department and that is just a side product not a necessity as it is not what lots of people see when they are surfing the board.
