Human Spammer Problems

[Tempest]

So just a little while ago I had a user who trolled and flamed and showed immense disrespect towards staff. I gave him fair warnings which he tossed out the window and threatened to do more harm if I took any action. That was enough, I wasn't going to play his game so I banned his account and the IP for good measure. Now the problem is he's using proxies to get past me. Luckily he's not too smart, he calls me out every time he gets past but I can't sit here all night banning accounts. As a last ditch effort, I switched the forum to manual validation for new registrations after banning all his alternate accounts and IPs. The problem with this is obvious. I'm getting registrations and I can't tell which one is real and which one is not. I tried running the IPs in google but that doesn't help. Out of the 3 accounts I ran, only one showed up as a spam IP. This is on a vBulletin 3.8 installation. What solution is available for getting rid of such spammers? We're going to switch this forum to xenForo in a matter of days so it'll be vulnerable in the transition process. How can I get rid of him for good now and keep him away while we're transitioning to xF?

 

[Jake Bunce]

In vBulletin you can use this feature:

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> User Banning Options -> Tachy Goes to Coventry

It is very effective at dealing with people like this. It is a global ignore feature. The user is basically invisible to everyone but they don't know it.

 

[Tempest]

You my friend have no idea how much that just helped me out. Here's hoping that the ignore function in xF 1.1 will also have some similar capability. Cheers!

 

[Paul B]

There is no similar feature in XenForo 1.1.

You can however Discourage users such as that and eventually they give up and go elsewhere.

 

[Floris]

Don't give him publicly any satisfaction of any type of attention. Just ban him, the ip, mail, and keep a log of this internally. Remove the posts from public. Once you recognize a pattern you will also be able to anticipate his actions.

Your ban list will have enough space to hold all his pathetic attempts.

Clearly he doesn't like the site, clearly he loves it. Best of luck - every forum has threats from idiots, hackers, ddos attack, spam, floods, they're even willing to tell their mom. Whatever! They waste a year of your life dealing with them, a hack, a ddos attack or whatever. But the years before that bad year, or the many years after .. you will still have a great community that these users aren't part of.

Don't let them get to you - they're just their own failure; Something they have to live with - not you.

Zero Tolerance.