Just wondering how everyone else handles those pesky users that their sole purpose is to make your site less fun and try to scare away members. How do you stop someone who has over 1000 IPs and several hundred emails? They can just keep coming back and sometimes you might not even know it is them.
If you are running your forum with MyBB, every member has a warning percentage. This is great when you don't want to just ban someone, you can just warn them by a percentage of your choice. Once the percentage reaches 100%, MyBB will ask you to verify their profile and make a decision as to if you should ban them or not.
With the ban hammer Simply if their misbehaving and spamming etc just use the ban hammer on them, also if your feeling generous throw in a range ban
But what if their IP is not in a specific range? They can use a VPN from 20+ countries and be back on the site in minutes just lurking...
Sometimes you just have to keep warning or banning them. I mean, I am sure that the forum trolls out there don't focus on one specific forum! They have others to go to!
True, but I am sure some of them will target specific forums and keep up with it for as long as possible. The tricky part is finding out who the trolls are and refinding them when they reregister.
And, hit the delete button! You have to be prepared to silently sabotage the spammers and trolls with your administrator powers. Most forums that ARE riddled with SPAM or trolls are only that way cause there's no strong admin/moderator presence on site. These trolls and spammers see an opening and go for it with their spam ads or bullying. After awhile, they will get tired of being deleted and go elsewhere to another forum that doesn't have such a watchful admin.
I use XenForo and it has a nasty discouragement for trolls, all I have to do is click a button. And presto their life on my forum is a living hell lol.
Ah yea, I recommended the IP Discouragement...best idea ever. It is fun to discourage yourself and to prank your fellow admins, the sad part is they figured out what I was doing .
I don't own a forum, yet. But on my last forum (MyBB), I was using Akismet and kept it clean of spam! Sometimes a few posts were bypassing Akismet's checks, and then I had to take action (delete posts + ban account/ip) As for the proxies, you can contact the proxy provider (lookup for the ip owner on a site that provides such information like ip-lookup.net), and most of the times the provider will take measures against spammers/trolls.
I use CloudFlare to prevent my spam(works beautifully), but trolls is another thing, I will use the user discouragement, ban system, spam cleaner, etc. to stop them but if they are really persistent what can we really do?
Restrict some sections to users who are posting useful stuff, or is not trolling. Leave a few sections open to everyone, and from there judge who's going to be promoted to a "Safe users" list. I don't think there is something effective against trolls, as they will always find a way to abuse all communities ;/ (You can go paranoid and ask for account activation using mobile phones etc, but it will surely hurt your community)
Hmmm...either of them seem like a community killer, maybe an Intro forum and they need to get that post approved, but really that would only stop spammers, not trolls.
