Quote:Original post by Telamon
Our casual online game has reached a milestone today - we need to ban our first problem user. Ideally, I would like to ban him from both playing the game (the game is played in a downloaded exe) and posting in our online forums.
I know the traditional approach to this has been blocking IP addresses, but in this day of proxy servers and wireless internet access, I am not sure that that would be effective.
It's very effective, and as you may have seen in the previous responses, it is pretty much your only simple choice. Contrary to the boasts of many a troublesome kiddie, IP addresses do not change that much between sessions, if at all, and tracking those changes is usually pretty trivial.
Implement banning individual IP addresses, and IP ranges, and hostnames (by wildcards). Keep logs of your players' login habits so you can quickly see what sort of ban is most appropriate. Ensure that players get a 'you have been banned' message with contact details so that innocent players who find themselves wrongly banned can contact you. Consider a ban that only bans new players from a given site, thus allowing you to delete that player while protecting any other players from that site. Also consider collecting that extra personal information such as email addresses for users from suspect sites only - it's not ideal, but it's better than banning everybody and it's better than banning innocents.