I have a website that is a small community. It has a few hundreds persons that login every day. I recently banned someone. She didn't accept it, so now, she create new accounts and post in the Forum bad things and chat and say all kind of things about me and about the community. She uses dynamic IP address with AOL. Banning all AOL would hurt the community. She also uses some proxy sometimes. So even if I ban her, she always come back. Anyone have dealt with a situation like that before? What should I do? It really hurts my little business. CCF
Depends how web savvy she is... can use a cookie if she is unlikely to think to clear them but generally speaking there is very little you can ultimately do to block a single individual who as a moderate level of understanding of website functions
If you're using vBulletin 3.6+, you could install the proxy ip plugin. This can detect if a proxy is being used and will attempt to get the "real ip" of the user. All vBulletin ip based functions, such as ip searching, who's online and ip banning, should work correctly. PM me if you want this plugin.
cookies is the best way to track people. U can easily detect her, all u need to do is that u put a little code in ur registration page. One important thing, do something like this, if the cookie is detected, then make ur captha verification fails every time even if person is entering it correctly
I have more than 400 community forums. I have SMF, PHPBB and vbulletin and years of experience with variety of modifications. YES cookies can help a lot, there are a lot of mods available in vbulletin.org you can search one if you use vbulletin , phpbb3 is still new and I am not sure if you can find mods for that but phpbb2 there is a mod which detects proxies too Good luck