UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums General Suggestions and Feedback Auto add banned members IP address to ban list

My site has always been plagued with spam from China, India, Beijing, etc. I don't have a registration queue as I don't have time to go through and verify new registrations so when spam appears I tend to ban the user and then add their IP address to the ban list. I think that it would be useful to have an option that would automatically add a banned members IP address to the ban list.

What would be really slick is when you add a banned ip. It will ban the ip from the whole site not just ubb.
One stop shopping is for me.

Do you really want to do that when there are roving IP addresses out there? For example, if you ban an AOL member, and block "his" IP, you will also be blocking the next AOL guy who ends up with that IP address.

You know, it wouldn't be too hard to do that ruben.. I'm too out of it to figure it all out right now, but i'm pretty sure you could write a small script and just use a php include on your site to check if the ip is in the "banned" database... I use a flat file on my site to check for banned users

Currently I use htaccess to ban IP numbers. I don't use the control panel.
But I do on occasion prune out old entries just for that reason.

I use the cp and keep record of why I banned the ip for such reasons of aol and when someone releases the ip. If someone really needs to be blocked I set that in the ip tables on the server.

I'm only banning people from posting on the forums, I don't want to stop people from viewing the site or forums. I also manually check IPs before blocking them.

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.

Okay that is your opinion. Mine is, if they abuse the forum then I don't want them at all.

I agree, Ruben.