Cookie banning?

[Jeff Lewis]

Anyone written a ban by cookie yet?

[groundup]

That is something I thought about and if someone realised it, they would have to be an idiot not to delete their cookie.

[Chris Cromer]

Um, if you ban them by their username, their cookie would contain their username still and they would be banned.

Are you talking about something more advanced than this though? Such as saving a banned cookie to their computer or a banned session?

[Jeff Lewis]

Something a little more advanced. In one of my forums we have a lot of troublesome users Damn I wish we could grab the MAC address

[Chris Cromer]

I know the feeling, sometimes there is nothing you can do about it either...

I had a few ideas though, modify the source a bit and make it print out "Sorry but the forum is in maintenance." when they are banned... this way they don't know they are banned.

[Iridium]

MAC address would be useless for all the modem/ADSL users out there, because they'd all be the same (either 00:53:45:00:00:00 or 44:45:53:54:00:00)

[groundup]

LOL, I think I mentioned that before but PHP and your server can't get the mac addy of a computer

[Iridium]

If you were so inclined, you could no doubt write a script in order to get the MAC address using NetBIOS (I actually wrote a program that would do this, and converting to PHP wouldn't be exessively difficult) but it's still a complete waste of time. Those people for whom IP bans don't work (those with dynamic IPs) are the same people who have generic MAC addresses.

[groundup]

eh? I thought the mac addy can't be gotten because the routers and switchs of all the hops would change it.

[Iridium]

If you were to simply read the hardware address from the packets you received from the client, then yes, you'd just get the MAC of the last router/switch the packet went through. However, using NetBIOS, you can determine the machine's actual MAC address.