IP address

Yes, you can allow guests to post. Although that's not a good idea as you'll be fighting spam on a regular basis.

And if you don't want the staff to read IP addresses associated with each post, don't give them permission to do so. But the software is still going to log the IP with each post.
 
Ability to not log IP's is important to us. This should be added. I guess we could do it with a mod, but should come that way out of the box.

We have a fair amount of experience running boards, so we are familiar with spam issues and we have developed a number of ways to combat.
 
If you don't give anyone permission to view IPs, nobody will see them (not even staff), but not logging them at all will only screw you if you get into legal trouble. I hope you know what you're doing.
 
Uh huh. And what happens when someone bans the IP? In a perfect world, sure, you can expect the staff to just ban users. And when they don't?

The recommendation is not something that should have been put out for public consumption as it has the ability to break a site rather spectacularly.
 
Couldn't you just modify the core code and where it writes the IP address to the database, just write something else in its place? I know it's not very elegant and non-upgrade friendly but possible the simplest/quickest hack.

We have a fair amount of experience running boards, so we are familiar with spam issues and we have developed a number of ways to combat.

I'm interested to know how you can combat spam when you allow guest posting, anonymously and without IP logging. Seriously, how do you stop it and how to you block persistent spammers? Do you have staff on-line 24/7?
 
Uh huh. And what happens when someone bans the IP? In a perfect world, sure, you can expect the staff to just ban users. And when they don't?

The recommendation is not something that should have been put out for public consumption as it has the ability to break a site rather spectacularly.

I think that this should be a public consumption thing - I have seen lots of requests for anonymity. I don't think it would be that hard for XenForo to have this feature built in - and of course it'll be disabled by default.

If they banned 127.0.0.1 you wouldn't be able to register/login when you are on root access to the server - but let's face it, that's not going to happen very often (you could just change it to something else like 127.0.0.100).
 
I agree with James. If his suggestion works then he is answering the OP's request with something that is just a config file edit. Surely that is the point of a support forum, and leave it to individuals to decide whether they want to use something at their own risk? I've seen many things posted that are equally or more destructive if done wrong.
 
I'm fairly sure (off memory) you can setup user permissions so that staff can not ban IP addresses (if its not default, there maybe a mod for that).

From there you could apply this as suggested
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/ip-address.46771/#post-503573

As general rule we "purge" our IP logs every so often at random times (1 - 2x a year) (in the database).... So I can sympathize in part. We do it for optimization (it does speed up the site), security, and because many of our members change IP's anyways (often)..... However we do still keep some kind of record.
 
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