Need ways to keep a really persistent troll out for good...

IP bans... nothing. Banned accounts, nothing. I've banned all disposable emails now, set it to auto ban matching cookies and IPs of banned users for new accounts and moderated all new members, but any other ideas?

Oh, this needs to be kept in a member's only section for security sake.

 

Banning never solved any problems for me. I just make life increasing more uncomfortable.

Requiring them to change passwords every week, a light dose of miserable users, moderate posts, all sorts of fun controls at your disposal (in vb).

A 'Notice' with there name in it that only they can see. "username has been voted on to be the next winner of the prize!"

tachy goes coventry if you really don't care about them.




Play with them like a cat that caught a bird, and don't let them get to you.

 

Very interested in all suggestions. Sneaking back in has sometimes been a problem, same frustrations as op. I think our best line of defense has been angry members who spot banned members in disguise.

Have heard this before ... rather than banning, use tachy & other tricky tricks to neutralize them and encourage a voluntary self-ban. But all that sounds like almost as much time & trouble as just banning them and then chasing sneak-ins.

When all else fails it's just been fodder for mods to speculate why on earth some people do this when they obviously aren't wanted.

 

my friends forum had a very persistent troll.

instead of banning him (which didnt work) they removed his access to any forums that contain personal information (pictures, the facebook/blogs section) to stop him using that information to impersonate others and then get people to give him information about them.
they removed his use of pm's and gave him random error messages several times a day.
his posts have to be approved by a mod before they reach the forum, but he doesnt know that, so he doesnt realise why people are ignoring him......

 

I am dealing with this right now...

I was a member of an older forum, been around since 02. The forum was dying off and the main propose was all but forgotten by the original members. The owner decided he was going to use it for another project in addition (meaning adding more boards) and the two teams of people (older members and second project people) constantly fought.
The site crashed and I opened a new forum for the second project. The original members like to spam the new forum with pictures of naked men on men and other disgusting images...

banned ips, hostname, username, e-mails, everything I could think of and had to turn on "require admin activation" just to keep it clean...which isn't ideal

On that note, anyway to disable (or restrict) members from posting images within the first 24 hours of their membership in SMF 2.0?

 

Install the "stop forum spam" modification - that will take care of a lot of it right there. If they use a proxy to access your site, I'am pretty sure that proxy is already on the ban list at stop forum spam.

Every account they sign up with, submit it to the stop forum spam site.

Working by yourself, it would be impossible to block all of the proxies. But when you have an army of forum admins working together, you can get a lot done.

 

IP addresses obviously aren't effective to some hard core trolls ... but they do help for people who are mostly logging on only from one computer.

Memory flash ... a couple of years ago we banned a troll, and of course her IP, only to discover that long before the ban she had registered with several different id's. (We bar the same email addy registering twice, but not ip's, cuz we have several families with multiple members and we prefer they all have their own identity.)

The IP did flush at least one addt'l registration. She had also used one of the extra id's on another forum, where her identity was known. From the known id's we found unusual words/phrases used in other id's and/or the linked email addresses, and were satisfied those were the same person. Let's just say that pre-emptory banning did not bring any complaint from an innocent member "hey what happened!!!"

And ... the members didn't like her or want her. She completed a couple of new registrations from diff. ip's but members who knew her from more than one forum picked up on it and ratted her out.

Obviously this was not the most sophisticated troll. But likely a fair number of trolls aren't. Some are younger and just treating a forum maliciously as a big toy. The basic steps do neutralize some of them.

I'm sure our ex-troll is much smarter now about not 'cleverly' using those identifying words/phrases in multiple forum registrations. I have no assurance this person isn't on my forum today under some new registration. I would bet she is. But if so she's behaving herself and hasn't re-emerged under our beefed-up short-fuse no-tolerance troll policy.

 

most trolls using dial-up connections, a typical sign of them.