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Can someone fill me in on the whole banning of IP (is this the right word) thing? I know dick about computers or the internet and it's workings, so I'm not entirely sure what this entails. I always gathered that when someone was repeatedly banned, and the person doing the banning knew it was the same person under different aliases, they could ban the IP so that person couldn't post from the same computer. Is this right? If so, why haven't Steph or Drew banned IP's for people like Simp or Spine? Is it hard to do? Can it cause problems for other people who may just happen to be in the same vicinity?



It's not hard to ban an IP address, but the problem is that for domestic access a specific IP is rarely tied to one computer these days.

Firstly, dynamic addressing is used by many ISPs. This means that IP addresses are allocated when a user connects and freed up when they disconnect to be reallocated to other users. To successfully ban a user on dynamic addressing, you would have to ban the entire range of IPs their ISP might grant them, and this is very likely to affect the innocent.

Secondly, many ISPs divert web traffic through a web proxy cache to save bandwidth. These are often "transparent", ie they give no control to the user or indication to webservers. With these ISPs, thousands of users appear to be connecting through the same address. It's easy enough to ban, but again very likely to hurt the innocent.

The best example of the limitations of IP banning is IRC, where it's the only means of banning. I once got caught in a ban that affected every cable modem user in the UK. Another example is gofuckyourself.com, which Luke Ford often links to. I've never been able to even browse the forums there, because my ISP proxy is banned.
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