Anyone responsible for managing users on a site is familiar with the difficulties presented by unruly users. These types of accounts may be bots, trolls, spammers or just normal people who are behaving in ways that violate your Terms of Service.
In these situations, BLOX has various tools that can be employed to help block the bad guys or minimize a bad situation until things calm down. One particularly useful method is banning a user from signing up based on their remote IP address.
Block user signup by IP address
If a user is misbehaving in the BLOX Comment system, for example, you are able to view that user's comment and ban them. Or, you can find their IP address, and block that IP address. To do this, follow these steps:
View the comment in question.
From the BLOX Comment screen, you can click to "ban" a user or "view" to enter their user account.
Click on "View" next to the user's name to view their user account.
Click on the "Authentication" tab.
Click on the "Show user sessions" button. This screen shows you all of the sessions where this user is logged in, along with the date and the user agent. Multiple sessions is normal and usually means the user has logged in from various computers and mobile devices.
Next to each user session there is a remote IP of the user for that specific section. Copy that IP address to your clipboard.
Go to User Accounts -> Application settings -> Signup block rules.
Create a new "Block by IP address" rule and enter the IP address of the user you want to block. IPs will use CIDR notation.
When done, no user will be able to create a new user account when visiting the site from that IP address.
NOTE: Be aware that some IP addresses may be shared by multiple users. Most ISPs will have a large group of IP addresses that are rotated through their customers dynamically. So, try to be as specific as possible when banning IPs. In addition, you may want to consider removing the ban after things cool down in order to ensure innocent users are not accidentally targeted.
Block user signup by email address
Alternatively, you can ban users by email address. Follow the same steps as above, but choose the "Block by email address" rule.
The email address can contain wildcards (an asterisk) so you can create a pattern to target multiple emails, or everyone from a certain site, all at once.
For example, if you have trouble with users who create fake email accounts on malinator, you can create a new rule for "*@mailinator.com" which will block all users from there.
Or you could enter *@*.* to target all emails and essentially shut down your new user creation feature.
For more assistance, please contact customer support at (800) 293-9576 or TownNews.com/support.
