Ban User Options

I second that.

Banning by IP address... What happens if your user has a dynamic IP?
The current method of banning operates by user login details, which includes email address.

To ban a member, send them a warning from the member section of forum admin. If necessary, refresh the page. From the drop down menu next to user name, select 'Banned'. That's it. Do not remove the member once banned or they can re-apply.

What if they just get a new e-mail address and apply again? With IP-banning at least it gets a little more difficult for them and people without dynamic IP and/or know-how will be excluded from abusing the system.

I think banning IP addresses would do more harm than good due to dynamic IP adds. and persistent trolls still do manage to find a loophole somewhere.

From experience, keeping on banning users is the only way.  It's much easier to ban someone as an admin than a troll keeping on registering and finding loopholes. 

Classical ways on dealing with trolls still works and if you have at least 3 admins/mods in your forum, you can always team-up and keep on either hiding posts thru voting or outright deleting posts.

It's always much easier for admins and mods to delete/hide posts or ban users than trolls keeping on trolling.  They will eventually tire out and almost always tire out first before any mods or admins do.

Try reading this for more info on how to deal with trolls: http://www.flayme.com/troll/moderators.shtml

im a staff from another site (not lefora) and we have this particular option with regards to dynamic ip and it happens that the abusive member got one, we sort of just ban them by username. we atleast one way or another we git rid of them. but if we find out that he/she has static ip, then there goes the ip ban. our admin tools there shows if this person shares the same ip with others (dynamic ip) and others having unique one. incase we decides to ban them by their email address, its one effective way we could eliminate them. i have had many experience banning certain members before and even now, either we never mind their spam post, they still come back and registers with another usernames. its like a battle no person can never win, well atleast these banning options can do little help anyway.

thanks for you feedback, we don't want to do a blanket IP ban because of dynamic IPs and shared IPs (like at universities, offices, etc.) (thanks for all the admins who pointed this out).

We plan to offer more options here in the future, such as possibly displaying the IPs and auto-detection of users that appear to be signing back up from the same machine.  However, these features won't be available for sometime as there are a few other items at the top of our list at the moment.

I wish there was a temporary ban time. Example, a member mouths off or acts up, the get a two day ban, or ten day, or until a certain date then they are automatically unbanned.

i certainly agree with your suggestion. coz other forums got that admin tools option. like so we could ban the hell out of them like 50 million years before they come back again hehe. just kidding =) , well i hope these suggestions could make way for better forum contol.