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I'm the founder of a community that uses a message forum (vB 3.0.3) as its heartbeat. It's called paxilprogress, and deals with mental health challenges and the drug Paxil. Being in this area of focus means we get the privilege of meeting the most interesting people, and vicious of harassers. (Or so I believe having never managed another forum aimed at a different demographic.)
My question is, what do you do with problem users? We have a troll that has created a flood of harassment, e-mail (constant social engineering outside the forum to convince us they are mistakingly banned), accounts, private messages, and who has done so with no less than 85 different identities (different fake first and last names, faked doctors and phone numbers) over the last 2.5 years. They have changed internet providers, browsers, and use public access computers in various locations to circumvent every single attempt at banning, even to the level of .htaccess files. We've tried e-mail, IP , and even manually reading access logs for user agent details (a real chore, with our 1+ million monthly hits).
That was sort of working, until they jumped on AOL with the rotating IPs. *sigh*
What do you do about AOL users? Our greatest harassment, uses AOL and/or rebranded resellers like WMConnect. He/she has an IP address that changes ever 60-120 seconds and is hell to track in access logs.
I spent a full year reporting and forwarding all harassing content to their ISP of the month, and have never received any help. AOL is especially deaf. I was even tempted to get an AOL account so that I could have 'member' status and more sway with their abuse reporting mechanism.
We have had to ban several e-mail domains as he/she spends their entire day creating new accounts with those providers and registering with us a dozen times a day. Not kidding! For 2.5 years! We're definitely in the mental health world. This person sits there all day, way into 3am, bugging and bugging and bugging, poking and testing, trying to get lost passwords triggered from several accounts, and our members have had enough.
So far we've had to ban "xoxma wmconnect gobigwest rock.com centralpets.com hotmail yahoo excite hotpop kaxy aol danworld walla msn", and new e-mail services are still being discovered and used by this individual.
We're painting ourselves into a registration corner as fewer people can join now as a result of these bans.
If you have the time and are feeling motivated to heroism, can you please share your experience and ideas on how you would deal with this? It's almost a case of stalking!
My next recourse is to create a 'new members' forum where all new members would have to answer a questionaire to prove credibility, and then we could promote their account to accessing other forum areas. We've just recently moved to vBulletin 3.03 from phpBB2.0.10 and are a little naive at what we can do with this technology.
I've just recently pruned the 500 or so accounts he/she created over the years. I wasn't pruning to remove the possibility that he/she use the same address twice, but got annoyed at some point hehe.
Thanks.
The forum is here : http://www.paxilprogress.org/forums/
My question is, what do you do with problem users? We have a troll that has created a flood of harassment, e-mail (constant social engineering outside the forum to convince us they are mistakingly banned), accounts, private messages, and who has done so with no less than 85 different identities (different fake first and last names, faked doctors and phone numbers) over the last 2.5 years. They have changed internet providers, browsers, and use public access computers in various locations to circumvent every single attempt at banning, even to the level of .htaccess files. We've tried e-mail, IP , and even manually reading access logs for user agent details (a real chore, with our 1+ million monthly hits).
That was sort of working, until they jumped on AOL with the rotating IPs. *sigh*
What do you do about AOL users? Our greatest harassment, uses AOL and/or rebranded resellers like WMConnect. He/she has an IP address that changes ever 60-120 seconds and is hell to track in access logs.
I spent a full year reporting and forwarding all harassing content to their ISP of the month, and have never received any help. AOL is especially deaf. I was even tempted to get an AOL account so that I could have 'member' status and more sway with their abuse reporting mechanism.
We have had to ban several e-mail domains as he/she spends their entire day creating new accounts with those providers and registering with us a dozen times a day. Not kidding! For 2.5 years! We're definitely in the mental health world. This person sits there all day, way into 3am, bugging and bugging and bugging, poking and testing, trying to get lost passwords triggered from several accounts, and our members have had enough.
So far we've had to ban "xoxma wmconnect gobigwest rock.com centralpets.com hotmail yahoo excite hotpop kaxy aol danworld walla msn", and new e-mail services are still being discovered and used by this individual.
We're painting ourselves into a registration corner as fewer people can join now as a result of these bans.
If you have the time and are feeling motivated to heroism, can you please share your experience and ideas on how you would deal with this? It's almost a case of stalking!
My next recourse is to create a 'new members' forum where all new members would have to answer a questionaire to prove credibility, and then we could promote their account to accessing other forum areas. We've just recently moved to vBulletin 3.03 from phpBB2.0.10 and are a little naive at what we can do with this technology.
I've just recently pruned the 500 or so accounts he/she created over the years. I wasn't pruning to remove the possibility that he/she use the same address twice, but got annoyed at some point hehe.
Thanks.
The forum is here : http://www.paxilprogress.org/forums/
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