Heh... and you have no idea how much stuff I had to delete... Not just stuff that I moved to the trash, but stuff that I had to go in and manually remove from the database. It helps that I wrote this thing. :)

It's kinda sad that this had to be done. I didn't create a way to ban people originally because I figured there would never be a reason to do it. Why would anyone want to trash our humble little web site? Unfortunately, it seems that if you attract enough people to your site, eventually someone will show up who gets joy out of vandalizing it. Such people are rarely swayed by reason, and so there ends up being no other option but to ban them outright.

Short story: A few vandals tried to mess with the site and got booted out the door.

Long story:

A week ago, Slip registered two new usernames called "Cows Eat Dirt" and "Dogs pee on Cows". He then went around the site posting "COWS EAT DIRT" and "DOGS PEE ON COWS" in various nodes and threads. I concluded it was him because he had logged in as himself from the same IP address shortly before the new usernames were created. By the time I found out about it, he had gotten bored and stopped. I quickly deleted all of the posts from the database (easy to do using direct SQL queries) and edited Slip's profile with a few words about the situation.

The next day, Slip logged in, edited his profile (with a claim that he did not write any of the stuff), and then ran into the same problem he has had quite often: His ISP (or, his school's ISP, I guess) causes his IP address to change frequently, which causes the server to log him out for security reasons. For some reason, he decided to start registering lots of new usernames, since that was all he could do before getting logged out. First he registered names like "slip", "The Duck" and "Hero".

At this point, noticing that my e-mail box was filling up with error messages resulting from his ISP problems, I replaced the v4 page with a simple page that read "Slip, you are causing problems. Please IM me." I also placed a link on the page to a backup copy of the real site, so that people could continue to use it.

Slip simply clicked on the backup copy and continued registering users. He then registered the names "temporalg", "blow on this fag", and "TRASH". At this point I asked my friend (who was hosting the server at the time) to block his IP address, which immediately put a halt to his activities. Indeed, from his point of view, the site simply disappeared from existence when we blocked him. I then cleaned up the fake users as before. I sent an e-mail to Slip to inform him of the ban, but I did not receive an immediate response.

Sometime over the weekend, ExtremeDrummer registered. As you may recall, his first post was this. The first thing I thought was, "If he doesn't know what this site is, why is he here? And why is he posting?" It seemed entirely too evident to me that this guy was going out of his way to make us believe that he had never been here before. Very suspicious.

On Monday, I received three e-mails from Slip in rapid succession. The first said "sorry". The second informed me that I had blocked his school (apparently, he had been accessing the site from school). The third said that he didn't care, and that "me and my friends were having some fun. and the site sucked anyways. aint like youll ever finish the game". "Whatever", I thought.

What was strange was 15 minutes after the third e-mail, when I received an e-mail from one Jeremy Bostic, asking why the site worked from his home but not from school. He said that he was ExtremeDrummer on the forums and that he was new. Of course, it wasn't hard to tell that this was either Slip under a different name or it was a friend of his. The e-mail headers indicated that he sent the e-mail from the same computer as Slip had sent his 15 minutes earlier. This computer was one that had been blocked from accessing the site. One has to wonder where he got my e-mail address if he could not access the site. And, if he got it from Slip, then why did he have to e-mail me to ask why the site was blocked? Slip already knew.

In any case, ExtremeDrummer hadn't done anything extremely dumb yet, so I let him be.

On Tuesday I moved the server. The IP bans were previously enforced by my friend's firewall, which the site no longer uses. I could have set up the server itself to block IP addresses, but I would have had to recompile the kernel to add that ability. Instead, I decided to write a new feature for v4 which allowed it. This way, I could set it up so banned people can still log in and read the site, but just not post. It took me a few hours to write, and was in place Tuesday night.

I did not immediately add Slip to the new list, though, instead deciding to give him "another chance" to see what he'd do. He happened to send me an e-mail that day in which he claimed that his "little brother" was the one who had defaced that site. I noted that he had sent me an e-mail confessing to the deed, to which he replied that his brother had sent the e-mail. Because, you know, apparently Slip lets his brother know his e-mail password and such. In any case, I informed him that I was giving him another chance.

So, what happened Wednesday morning? A couple new users were registered -- from Slip's school's network -- including one named "Nseal00". Extreme Drummer immediately posted the infamous welcome thread, in which he and this guy (who obviously already knew each other, being from the same school) began holding a freeking conversation on the message boards. They also posted a few posts here at the same time. All of these were mindless posts which obviously had no other purpose than to be annoying and waste space.

So, I decided to give the new banning feature a spin. I banned Slip's school, as well as ExtremeDrummer's home address. The posts stopped. It worked. :)

I immediately received a storm of e-mail from Jeremy/ExtremeDrummer. He was upset that I had banned him for "welcoming a new user". Soon the e-mails degenerated into a rather amusing string of profanities, which I will not share here. Needless to say, none of this amounted to the apology which the ban message told him he should send, and thus he remains banned.

That's pretty much it. Well, that's all the interesting parts, anyway. Of course, they can still read all of this, though I imagine they have left now that I have put an end to their juvenile fun.

That's not true. The things I did to stop these guys were all pretty trivial. Even implementing the new banning feature only took an hour or so. I have spent a lot more time working on the game itself in the last month, particularly if you count weekly meetings.

mmm....Klegnuts....