OK, I have an abusive person on our forum that has much more time on his hands than we do. Our forum deals with Belize Belize Forums and apparently he had some bad experience there (His username is belizelover45 incase you want to see the type of posts). We have done to date:

1. We have tried deleting his posts, but when we do, he will log on at night and spam the entire board with foul language.

2. We have deleted his account, but he signs back up with a different email address through yahoo or hotmail.

3. We tried banning him by IP, but he signs on with AOL, and we end up losing a large portion of our members when we ban AOL IP's

4. We have tried ignoring him, and warning new members not to reply, but his posts are very abusive and new members most of the time question him which then sets him off.

5. We have taken on new moderators to try and keep up with deleting his posts to no avail.

6. There is no way to reason with this fellow, he is beyond reason.

7. We have turned on admin OKing registrations, but this is time consuming and we don't always know if it is him or not, so we OK registrations and the next thing we know, the forum is flooded again.

8. I've increase flood control to 600, but he appears to have all day to wait.

We have over 5000 members, and average about 20 postings per day, so we are an active forum and would hate to shut down.

If admins had a bit more power, I believe we could deal with him, for example:

1. Give admins ability to preview posts by specific member.

2. Give admins the ability to flag specific members as trouble makers.

3. Give admins the ability to over ride the members ability to turn off ratings.

4. Give admins the ability to filter all postings?

I believe you can not give admins too much power as it is their boards. If they abuse their power, they will loose community.

Anyone have similar trouble or can offer advise?

Rather than deleting his account, try locking his account posting rights. Also, have you tried emailing this person and telling them that their conduct is a violation and that they need to stop.

One Option I heard that some boards do is to disallow registrations from free email services due to that reason.

Personally, if you have his AOL screen name, report him to AOL. That should hopefully cure him for good.

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"I see dumb people....they're everywhere. They walk around like everyone else. They don't even know they're dumb"
TheGeeksInc.com Forums

I would recommend:

- Banning yahoo.com and hotmail.com email addresses, along with any other free email addresses. Request any members that registered with those addresses to change their profile to the email address supplied by their ISP/school. Remember, they don't have to make it public.

- When you delete his messages add the ip address and date/time to a text file, after you have about 20 entries, email that file to his ISP explaining that he has been warned not to do this. They can verify the IPs in the log are theirs and they will probably respond better than to unsubstantiated claims. What he is doing is considered a violation of the TOS (Terms of Service) with most ISPs.

Moderating registrations also does a good deal to keep the riff raff out. Of course, you have to have someone check the queue periodically.

-jlb

I agree. If you have information on his ISPs (AOL and/or others), at this point you may wish to contact them.

Moderating all new membership registrations for sometime can definitely help too!

Good luck. Let us know how it turns out...