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Its about as useful as a chocolate fireguard. Say I'm banned on MSE using my current IP address. As its not static all I have to do is reset the router, my ISP will assign me a new IP address and I'm good to go again. The only way to ban me is to ban everyone using my ISP so you'd need to ban a couple of million people. And even then that only works if I'm connected to the internet via my ISP. Use my mobile phone tethering, a relative/friends/McDonalds wifi and I'm good to go again.
Banning people is a complete and utter waste of time as your only options are username, IP address and email address and all can be changed in a few seconds. "You have been banned" is just a way of the forum admins saying "We don't know how the internet works."
Originally posted by Tarambor
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That's not quite true.
Yes, if someone was prepared to post from various internet cafes around the country it would be very difficult to keep track of them.
But most spammers are lazy and post from their home and one or two locations in their town.
If we are talking about dynamic IP addresses issued by ISP, then those usually change within a pattern that can be analysed by software. They're not just issued completely at random
In fact some Forum admin panels allow you to do some analysis on IP addresses used, to try to identify previously banned users.
In fact it's possible to do it by eye, by just looking at the previous IP addresses of the banned user and comparing them to the IP addresses used by the new user.
It's not perfect and takes a bit of time, but speaking as a former forum admin (not on here), I've certainly been able to identify a previously banned user from the pattern of their IP addresses.