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Jan 6, 2002 | 12:58 AM

Bobby Kinstle

Thread Starter

AudiWorld Uber User

Joined: Mar 2000

Posts: 38,920

Likes: 325

From: Bay Area, CA

Question about forum administration

I've been helping a friend admin some forums for computer mods (http://www.applefritter.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.pl), and lately, we've been having a problem with a really obnoxious user. In this forum unregistered users could post under the guest account, but not send messages or see email addresses and such. I warned the guy several times to tone it down to no avail. He always wanted to turn it into a public debate. Since he was using Guest, I didn't have any email address for him to make it more private. Finally, I ended up filtering the IP of his cable modem. Then he started using dial up accounts to post, so I disabled the ability of the guest account to write anything to the forum (read-only). So he registered an account. Today I sent a note to his ISP asking them to put a stop to him.

So my question is, just how do you deal with some obnoxious ******* who just won't go away?

Jan 6, 2002 | 09:58 AM

System_S4k

AudiWorld Super User

Joined: Jul 2001

Posts: 18,111

Likes: 1

Ya, how do you deal with guys like me that are on dial-up and have random IP adresses?

Jan 6, 2002 | 10:57 AM

Johannes Erdfelt

Member

Joined: Mar 2000

Posts: 3,401

Likes: 0

A couple of ways

Requiring an email address helps significantly. We've only had really annoying users create a couple of different email addresses and then eventually give up.

We've also filtered IP addresses, but we mostly just suspend accounts.

Thankfully, it's easier for us to suspend accounts than it is for them to create new email accounts. And we have a bunch of moderators.

Jan 6, 2002 | 10:57 AM

Johannes Erdfelt

Member

Joined: Mar 2000

Posts: 3,401

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You still need a valid email address to post

Jan 6, 2002 | 10:30 PM

Bobby Kinstle

Thread Starter

AudiWorld Uber User

Joined: Mar 2000

Posts: 38,920

Likes: 325

From: Bay Area, CA

Hmmm... I think I'll look into editing the forum software to require a valid email address then.

Thanks.

Actually making guests read only seems to have solved the problem for now. Like you guys, there's a lot more I can do towards limiting a registered user.