Lack of interest Blocking by Hostname Domain

[CollinL]

On my Xenforo site, I find the feature "Manually approve registration if user shares IP used by a banned user in last X days" to be very useful. Banned users will try to make alternate accounts only to find their registration rejected because it was sent to manual approval and denied by a staff member (who saw the user the account in question shares an IP with).

Some users, however, are able to get around this by using VPNs. Well, Xenforo seems to be pretty adept at finding the hostname of an IP (example: http://i.imgur.com/4DYhPlb.png).

I could try to find all HotSpotShield's IP blocks and manually block them, say, with CloudFlare or IPTables, but that would be difficult or at least time-consuming. If Xenforo had the option to disallow registrations that use an anchorfree.com hostname on registration, then this would be easy.

My suggestion is essentially add a way to deny certain user actions (such as registration or thread creation) to users who have certain domains in their hostnames.

Implementation of this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading.

*Note: I'm not looking to block all VPN traffic from my site, only the sketchy, free VPNs like HotSpotShield (which seems to be the most popular one for ban evading and is also malware), so please don't go all eff.org on me.

 

[rainmotorsports]

Pretty close to releasing a plugin that does just this for Tor users. You can choose wether to block registration but allow login, or to block altogether. Etc. Covering all VPN providers is fun and of course that is why you are looking for the ability to add hostnames. Its a nice idea.

You can block disposable emails by block *@mailinator.com I believe. Just follow the directions in the email ban page. However the list of those sites goes into the thousands. So there is no "easy" way about it. There is a paid resource in the RM for that. Not sure who made it.

 

[CollinL]

~snip~.

Oh, I totally blanked on the email banning system. Thanks for the reminder. I removed it from the post.

Seems like a very nice plugin, but Tor users aren't my issue. I'd really love the ability to configure the blocked hostnames so that I could block popular trashy VPNs.

 

[rainmotorsports]

Seems like a very nice plugin, but Tor users aren't my issue. I'd really love the ability to configure the blocked hostnames so that I could block popular trashy VPNs.

Tor however is the easiest way to create new accounts when you are banned from a site. One click, new ip, cookies and tracking data cleared. I have experienced it and its like a trashy VPN you don't even have to sign up for. Even better you can't block it by hostname. But since the exit node IP's are published there is still a way.

 

[CollinL]

Tor however is the easiest way to create new accounts when you are banned from a site. One click, new ip, cookies and tracking data cleared. I have experienced it and its like a trashy VPN you don't even have to sign up for. Even better you can't block it by hostname. But since the exit node IP's are published there is still a way.

I see. My banned users must not be that smart, though, as I've only seen a couple ever use Tor for ban evading.

Would really appreciate an opinion from @Brogan or @Jake Bunce on this.

 

[TPerry]

Tor however is the easiest way to create new accounts when you are banned from a site. One click, new ip, cookies and tracking data cleared. I have experienced it and its like a trashy VPN you don't even have to sign up for. Even better you can't block it by hostname. But since the exit node IP's are published there is still a way.

I like CSF for that reason. Does it catch all of them.. probably not, but it does a majority of them.
Of course, this requires that you be on a VPS or dedicated server.

# MaxMind GeoIP Anonymous Proxies
# Details: http://www.maxmind.com/en/anonymous_proxies
MAXMIND|86400|0|http://www.maxmind.com/en/anonymous_proxies

# Alternative TOR Exit Nodes List
# Details: http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/
ALTTOR|86400|0|http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/ip_list_exit.php/Tor_ip_list_EXIT.csv

 

[Sheratan]

Err... DenyHosts?

apt-get denyhosts

 

[Snog]

I don't know if this will help or not, but you could try it..
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/ban-by-hostname.2479/