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Effective banning techniques

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chrissparkle

Programmer
Joined
Mar 27, 2006
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50
Location
NZ
I have a dating site and I have a few problem users that I ban, but create new accounts and are wreaking havoc with my site. What is an effective banning technique to prevent them from registering again as a new user.

I tried banning IP's but that didnt work - I banned one IP and inadervently banned 500 users.

Are there any other solutions i could try?
 
What details to they gives you when they subscribe?

Do you get a name? Address? Credit Card Details?

All of those things can be used to stop a user re-subscribing to the site.

rob
 
Hi have a dating site too I know your delima

one thing I did to cut down on banned members was to make the email address unique. So If I banned a member, they could not re register with the same email. Its not even close to beeing fool proof but it is a deterrent after they registered a few times.

I also did the ip banning, are you using all 4 sections of the ip address.

one other thing I done was create a login table and keep track of users as the logged in...every now and then I would review the table for trends and patterns...I found numerous people with duplicate accounts that way.

Hope this helps if only a small bit.

Craig
 
I tried IP banning (all 4 parts yes).. but found this way too unpredictable. I banned one member and then saw that 500 other members had that same IP. I have made the email address unique - but again this doesn't really stop people.

I was thinking about creating a cookie on the clients computer with a random number/word.. and then storing that number in my db. Then I could match up duplicate accounts etc by checking their cookie when they signed up.

I realise people could easily get around this by clearing their cookies - but a) some people wouldn't know i was doing this via cookies. b) if they did know, they would grow tired of clearing cookies, signing up, over and over and would soon give up.

Any thoughts?
 
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