Ask HN: How to ban users from your site?

[vivekamn]

What should be the approach for banning offending users from your site? The only way I can think of to identify them is their IP. In the world of proxies and shared ips, how to ban one user, with out impacting other legitimate users?

[chuffwaffle]

Proxies make it impossible to ban anyone. You can detect open proxies like slashdot does and prevent anyone from using any open proxy, but offenders can still use non-open proxies. You can charge for access like somethingawful does so that when you ban someone's account they have to pay $10 or so for another. That's about it.

[lacker]

You can't really ban users from a website that's free to the public. All you can do is bore problematic users into going away.

[bdwalter]

These guys do it all day long.

www.iovation.com