UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.classic UBB.classic 6 Support 6.7.0 question about CP & multiple account griefers

I've a question here (and I'm also going to do some more research on ubbdev).

I'm shifting my somewhat populated board, UBB 6.2.1, to a new revamped UBB 6.7.0.

It's about an 800 member board so far and continues to grow.

What I'm slowly running into now, after 800+ days of continual service, is griefers and flamers becoming a bit more common. Not a lot, not anywhere close to an IGN board nightmare, but the community I support is about creative art basically, and the flaming/griefing doesn't help too much.

I'm looking for a way to be automatically made aware of not too smart users that sign up multiple accounts. I've gone through UBBDEV and there are no hacks really that will help eliviate this.

This morning I noticed a feature in the 6.7.0 CP that I've never seen before: General >> Recent Visitors >> (scroll down) expand Advanced Settings >> Unique IDs to Assign per IP:

What does this mean? I've gone through the Docs here on ubbcentral and I didn't come across an description for this function. I'm going to assume it is a variable I can set to say how many accounts can be created under a unique IP?

If this is so, then what about legitimate users, like a husband & wife, in the same household on a single computer that each have their own account on the board. If I set that variable to 1, will that ruin it for them?

Is there a way to have my cake and eat it too?

Here's the specific location, in fact I'd like to know what each of these variables are for:

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There is an option for a member queue, but you'd have to be available to approve any new members.

The Unique IDs to Assign per IP is for recent visitors. When PNTF (Recent Visitors) gets a user, it tracks by IP, and assigns them an ID string for tracking (something like iZqbTHkprwQ). That Unique IDs setting controls how many of those ID strings can be assigned to a particular IP.

For example, some proxy servers hop you around IPs while you surf, so it is possible that you get a new session on the same IP. A prime example of this happened on my boards recently.

I looked at my PNTF, and saw "SubZero, Hotwire, and 19 guests", so I thought I was getting crawled. Turns out that the other user was on a Proxy that was rotating him between 5 IP addresses, and he was showing up 20 times in PNTF(5 IP adddresses x 4 times per IP).

The Recent Visitors function doesn't perform any checking for dual accounts, though I suppose you could monitor it frequently and begin noting IP addresses of users...

The number of UNIQs per IP is a saftey check. Each user gets a unique session cookie set on their machine during the initial request. Some users block cookies. As a result, the unique cookie would be reset each time. These unique cookies are used to track the number of users, so you can imagine what would happen to the guest count if there was no maximum limit to the number of unique cookies handed out to a single IP address.

The cookies do expire after the session ends, though, so they can't be used as an effective method of determining duality.

There IS a hack on UBBDev that hijacks the login and logout forms and does some cookie magic to catch duals, but I don't think it's been updated since the 6.4 days... It MIGHT still work in 6.7.

FWIW - I use the option to require unique email address on members, that seemed to cut way down on dual registrations.

I saw that Hack, Charles, and I took it apart but it simply targets stuff in 6.4 that doesn't exist the same way in the 6.7 build.

It could work in theory with a lot of effort, but it's not a simple "add this after that" hack any longer <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />