This section of the Admin Control Panel allows you to set the Banning Options for your forum along with IP bans.
- Enable Banning Options
Banning allows you to stop certain IP addresses and email addresses from registering and posting to the forum. - Banned IP Addresses
Use this option to prevent certain IP addresses from accessing any part of your board.
If you enter a complete IP address (242.21.11.7), only that IP will be banned.
If you enter a partial IP (243.21.11. or 243.21.11), any IPs that begin with the partial IP will be banned. For example, banning 243.21.11 will prevent 243.21.11.7 from accessing your board. However, 243.21.115.7 would still be able to access your board.
You may also use an '*' as a wildcard for increased flexibility. For example, if you enter 243.21.11*, many IPs will be banned including: 243.21.11.7, 243.21.115.7, 243.21.119.225.Warning:Use this option with caution. Entering an incorrect IP can result in banning yourself or other genuine users from your forums. - Banned Email Addresses
Email address ban lists: You may ban any email addresses from registering and posting. Type in the complete email address (user@example.com), or use a partial email address (as in @example.com).
Note that partial email addresses are matched from the end of the address unless you enable 'Aggressive Email Banning' below. Therefore if you ban @example.com you will ban user@example.com, but if you ban @example that user will not be banned. If you enable 'Aggressive Email Banning', user@example.com would be banned by @example.
If the email address of a user attempting to register or change their email address matches any of the addresses you specify here will see a no-permission error. For example, if you have banned 'example.com' then a user attempting to use 'someone@example.com' will be rejected. - Aggressive Email Banning
If this option is enabled, when checking for banned emails, incomplete addresses are matched anywhere in the email address, not just the end.
For example, if this option is enabled 'yahoo' will block any email address with 'yahoo' in it. If this option is disabled, no emails will be banned unless the ban was changed to 'yahoo.com'. - Allow User to Keep Banned Email Addresses
If you ban an email address and a user already uses that address, a problem will occur. Using this option, you can specify whether the user will have to enter a new email address in their profile when they next modify their email address, or whether the user can just keep the email address which you have banned. - Tachy Goes to Coventry
This option allows you to effectively add a user or users to every member's 'Ignore List'. However, users in this list can still see their own posts and threads...
Enter a list of userid numbers, separated by spaces (for example: 4 12 68 102).Note:If you change this option, you need to rebuild thread and then forum information in Maintenance > Update Counters.