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Okay this may be a dumb question....but. A new guitar/music forum that I belong to, and know the admin. Is having a problem with a poster that keeps signing up under a new name after getting banned. All he does is post porn links among other stupid stuff. I told the admin to just block his IP. But he says it does not show up. Hosting a forum is new to both of us as well. Any ideas???

What software is the board using? There really has to be a way to see the user's IP. Our buddies over at Neowin have a forum specifically for Bullitin Boards: http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showforum=99 so it may be worth looking there if you need an answer immediately.

Please forgive my ignorance but I guess you are talking vB or phpBB? If so I think it is phpBB.

EDIT: Also he is not really hosting the site. Its a free hosting site. I went to that link, tryed a search. Told me I had to be a member to use that feature! I will keep looking though. Thanks for the link.

EDIT #2: Yes it is phpBB. I just found out that this user's IP address keeps changing. That is why we cant block the IP address. We know its the same person from what he post, his profile, link to his website etc.

see if you can capture is MAC address and filter on that

you're going to need someone who really understands TCP/IP as well as
web servers.

During the login process, you know he's online and the current IP
address. Make a reverse connection to grab the MAC and save in the users profile.
Once they start making content you disapprove, you can copy the
MAC into another table ejectedUsers(MACaddress).

Now you can await the next login and sample ;
Make a reverse connection MAC == ejectedUsers(MACaddress) and disallow
login.

content from ejectedUsers(MACaddress,loginID) can also be auto deleted
in background.

...

Needs some reading up on networks perhaps

MAC addresses are totally unusable across routers because a MAC address is an ethernet-level entity and is used to address a device only on its local network. And since these are internet forums, there are many, many routers between the user and the server.

If you were to do a "reverse connection" on an internet IP, you would get the MAC address of the first router device in the IPs direction. And blocking that MAC would effectively block all traffic from that router. Since most servers have only one gateway, you would effectively cut off all intenet access to your server (and you'd have to get local access to take it online again).

And, even if you were able to obtain the MAC address of the user's computer through some trickery, all he would have to do would be to use another computer or change the MAC in the network card's properties.

I think maybe my admin friend should contact the owners/admins of the hosting site to see what can be done. Neither of us know squat about TCP/IP etc. Thanks for all your help. I was hoping it would be something fairly simple that would fix this.

I looked over at Neowin and didnt really find anything that helped me. But we are still seeing the same user signing up on the site posting porn links etc. Every single time the IP is different. I go in and ban the user and block the IP. Next day he is back under new name and IP. Any thought on stopping this would be most appreciated!

EDIT: Can a mod please change the title of this thread to "Blocking an IP address that keeps changing??"

Thread title edited.

Are the IP addresses from the same network (first numbers are the same)? If yes, then you can just block the entire IP range. Other than that, there is nothing you can do really.

Only 2 of the IP's start the same. The others are always different. Guess I will just start blocking them one at a time. Thanks for your help!