Disable a Member
From KickApps API Reference
You can ban troublesome members from your community by using the following techniques.
Contents |
Prevent a member from logging in
To prevent a member from logging in,
- Log into the Affiliate Center.
- Navigate to Manage > Members.
- Enter the member's username into the search field. If you do not know it, leave the field blank and use the advanced search options to search for the member.
- Click the search button.
- Locate the member in the search results.
- Click the "disable" link (it's near the right end of the table).
- Decide whether you want to reject all of the member's media in addition to disabling him or her. Rejected media will be removed from your member-facing pages.
- Click Ok.
Blacklist a member's IP address
If you've disabled a member's account by following the directions above, and then find that same user causing trouble on your site with a different account, you can prevent that user from logging in by targeting his or her IP address.
To blacklist a member's IP address,
- Log into the Affiliate Center.
- Navigate to Manage > Members.
- Enter the member's username into the search field. If you do not know it, leave the field blank and use the advanced search options to search for the member.
- Click the search button.
- Locate the member in the search results.
- Click the member's username.
- Click the "Block IP Address" button on the right.
- Click Save.
Use this feature sparingly and with care: internet service providers sometimes reuse IP addresses for many different users, so several people may be accessing your community from a single IP address.
Blacklisting a range of IP addresses
The 4.3.10 release of the KickApps platform (scheduled for the evening of 10/29) includes a new option to blacklist whole ranges of IP addresses in addition to specific addresses. An IP address includes 4 blocks of integers that map to a specific user or group of users - the leftmost is the most general information and the rightmost is the most specific.
As an example, these 2 IP addresses are both within the 122.163.114 range:
122.163.114.35 122.163.114.36
To blacklist that range, use an asterisk (*) as a wildcard:
122.163.114.*
You can use those wildcards in any of the 3 rightmost blocks to create more general blacklists:
122.163.*.*
Should you blacklist IP ranges?
If you've been blacklisting a lot of spammers then you've seen that they tend to cluster around specific IP ranges.
IP addresses are grouped geographically and spamming is more profitable in countries where a US dollar is worth more (typically this means countries with weaker economies). As a result, we see most spammers coming from 2 regions: Eastern Europe and the Pacific Rim.
You can use free online tools like the ARIN WHOIS database search ([1]) to learn more about the IPs you've blacklisted. Just enter the IP in the form (must be a full IP, no wildcards) and click "submit query" to learn more.
Our experience indicates that you'll probably decrease some of the spam traffic coming into your site by blocking IP ranges from those regions (we recommend some specific ranges below). The trade off is that you'll also be blocking some legitimate users from those regions, so proceed with caution. For some webmasters, this is an acceptable trade-off, for reasons including:
- Their community and content isn’t relevant to those regions.
- They run ad-supported sites and their advertisers pay less for views from those regions (not uncommon for sites that use ad networks such as Google AdSense).
- They use their KickApps-powered community to supplement an ecommerce site that cannot serve those regions due to exchange rates or fulfillment restrictions.
Ranges to blacklist
We've used test sites and affiliate feedback to generate a "worst offenders" IP list, which focuses on spam coming from APNIC, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, which serves traffic from East Asia and the Pacific Rim.
So far, we're having the most success blocking the following range of IPs on our test sites.
- 122.163.114.*
- 122.163.115.*
- 122.163.116.*
- 122.163.117.*
- 122.163.118.*
- 122.163.119.*
- 122.163.*
- 220.255.7.*
- 112.200.*
Check the IP addresses of any spam accounts on your community before blacklisting any of the addresses listed here. You can see a member's IP address in 2 places in the Affiliate Center:
- The profile details page.
- In the Member Blacklist section (when you "block" a member their IP address is automatically added to the blacklist; disabling a member does not blacklist their IP though).
If you don't have any matches, we don't recommend blacklisting these ranges. APNIC serves traffic from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and other low-spam countries from which you might be receiving good traffic and community members.
The list above includes the worst offenders. Here are a few more ranges you might look for:
- 110.172.159.*
- 110.172.165.*
- 119.73.64-8.*
- 120.28.66-76.*
- 121.54.68.*
- 124.6.181.*
- 125.60.235.*
- 125.62.117.*
The limits of IP blacklisting
IP blacklisting is part of a larger KickApps strategy to stop spam on any KickApps-hosted community.
Blacklisting IP ranges will help prevent some spammers from accessing your site: it targets "spam farms" of low-paid teams based in specific regions. Unfortunately, other more sophisticated spammers are based in regions such as North America and Europe, tend to change IP addresses frequently, and use IP proxies, which allow them to mask their own IP address. Stay tuned, we're going to stop them too.
We'll continue to roll out more features and improvements to help your community thrive. As always, our top recommendation is to actively manage your community and encourage involvement from your members.