I Need To Know : Is it true that IP banning doesn't work or is that another lie?

If other sites can get rid of trolls by banning their IP address, why can't IMDb?

IP addresses aren't always confined to one person. If a person uses a shared space, then banning that IP address can ban everyone else using that space.

Also, one individual's IP address can change for any number of reasons.

And trolls have the ability to spoof IP addresses so when they post, it shows the IP address of some innocent person. They just switch out the address as soon as one gets banned or just randomly use a new spoofed IP address every time.

So, in smaller cases, banning can work. But it's the last resort for most sites since they can catch up innocent parties in their ban. And in the case of dedicated trollers, it will never work.

Furthermore, all this takes time for the moderator. I can speak from experience, if your mods are volunteers, dealing with this sort of stuff will wear them down. If your mods are paid, higher volumes of problems require more manpower and more money. Is this where you want to focus your money and manpower? Basically babysitting people with no internal moral compass and answering the constant whining of everyone who thinks they've been insulted?

I definitely noticed an upswing in *demands* for moderator attention from people just in INTK (whether posted here or moved here). Really, it was annoying to me and I was only a casual visitor to the site.

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IP addresses aren't always confined to one person. If a person uses a shared space, then banning that IP address can ban everyone else using that space.

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Yes, but if someone is a hardcore troll, then it's not unreasonable to ban anyone using their IP address for the sake of the boards.

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Also, one individual's IP address can change for any number of reasons.

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But what percentage of people who haven't moved recently have changing IP addresses? I've heard that AOL IP addresses change, but how many people use AOL these days?

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And trolls have the ability to spoof IP addresses so when they post, it shows the IP address of some innocent person. They just switch out the address as soon as one gets banned or just randomly use a new spoofed IP address every time.

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Could you explain that more? I've read a lot about IP addresses and VPN and I've never heard of that. It sounds like something that would take a lot of technical expertise.

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Furthermore, all this takes time for the moderator. I can speak from experience, if your mods are volunteers, dealing with this sort of stuff will wear them down. If your mods are paid, higher volumes of problems require more manpower and more money. Is this where you want to focus your money and manpower? Basically babysitting people with no internal moral compass and answering the constant whining of everyone who thinks they've been insulted?

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I've been a moderator too, and it was very easy to ban people. Amazon makes huge profits, and they can afford to pay for an adequate number of mods. They make the excuse that they have millions of boards without mentioning the fact that only a very tiny fraction of those boards are active. And the money wouldn't be for "babysitting people with no internal moral compass" since those people should be banned.

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I definitely noticed an upswing in *demands* for moderator attention from people just in INTK (whether posted here or moved here). Really, it was annoying to me and I was only a casual visitor to the site.

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Sorry, what's "INTK"? I tried to look that up, but I couldn't find what you're referring to.

just a brief response.

IP addresses at one household can change overnight. Google it.

If you were the person who was denied access to your favorite site because you were caught up in an IP ban, you would feel differently, I bet. I had friends who lived in a convent and got caught up in an IP ban at a LOTR fan site. The mods were able to work around it but it happens and it was work for the mods. My friends were distressed for not being able to post and for feeling they'd done something wrong without realizing it. Think of how people here react when their post is deleted. Now imagine they are banned when they don't know what they did.

I'll let you google the spoofing IP addresses. It was something I looked into when I was modding because we had some persistent nasty tolls (racist, obscene, etc) that kept popping up even after banning the IP addresses they were using. Also, we had people spoof IP addresses to get around a 'one vote per IP address' March Madness game we were running. To remind myself of the specifics, I'd have to google it again. You can do that as easily as I can.

INTK = sorry. It's "I Need to Know" a common acronym on these boards.

Remember that it wasn't only needing to ban people that I think tipped the scales for IMDB. For every troll, there was at least one whiny 'innocent' that knew they could put the troll on ignore and everything would be solved for their own piece of mind. But they refused. They would badger and insist that SOMETHING BE DONE about this person. Those were just the posts we saw on INTK. How many were going to the admins? In the last year or so, people were just getting way more vocal about insisting that the admins do this and insisting that admins do that. I don't think IMDB wanted to be - as I've put it - babysitters. If we couldn't behave and use the tools they gave us (ignore) and use some common sense about not feeding trolls, then that's on us. We all want someone else to fix our perceived problems when sometimes we have to take personal responsibility.

I do think they could pay for mods if they wanted the boards to be a feature that they can put forth as part of their site. I don't think they do. It's their site. They get to decide where to put the resources. People can stomp their feet as much as they want and make all kinds of arguments about how they don't agree but it's too late.

Seriously. I think folks got to move on. I'm sad they're going. But I do get why this makes sense for a business enterprise and I know that I almost never get what I want in life so I'm letting go.

edited to correct way too many typos and to thank Jeorj Euler for providing more info and deeper context to my comments.

I get the feeling Internet Relay Chat operators are a little more familiar with the problem than web administrators and web forum moderators are. I doubt that most people with web forum moderation experience are even aware of the Chat protocol.

Most consumer-tier Internet addresses are not static, and statics are becoming a thing of the past.

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But what percentage of people who haven't moved recently have changing IP addresses? I've heard that AOL IP addresses change, but how many people use AOL these days?

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It's large. A lot of people's public Internet addresses are assigned via Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. The addresses can change everyday or more or less often. The definitely tend to change whenever the modem (or whichever customer premise equipment) is reset.

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Could you explain that more? I've read a lot about IP addresses and VPN and I've never heard of that. It sounds like something that would take a lot of technical expertise.

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There are all kinds of open proxies, infected hosts and hacked wi-fi hot spots out there that are under the radar of sites dedicated to tracking them. There are a ridiculous number of ways for people to conceal their point-of-presence addresses or to simply not have permanent addresses.

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Amazon makes huge profits, and they can afford to pay for an adequate number of mods.

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But that's not what Amazon is about. Their funds are committed to other things, like quadcopter development and deployment.

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Sorry, what's "INTK"? I tried to look that up, but I couldn't find what you're referring to.

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The acronym for "I Need to Know".

Trolls and bad behaviour is not the reason they're closing it, no point in discussing the IP banning.

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OCD predator: www.goo.gl/0avZjB

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Trolls and bad behaviour is not the reason they're closing it,

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The staff believes that the boards' toxic environment played a significant part in a lots of users leaving, but they've also pointed out that a vast majority of the sites users aren't even aware of the message boards. I think there are a number of other unstated contributing factors.

Can you be surprised nobody is aware? IMDb did EVERYTHING in their power to hide the forums from everybody. They hid them well, even Google doesn't know they exist.

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OCD predator: www.goo.gl/0avZjB

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Google doesn't know they exist.

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That's a joke, right? It's just that search engines are not allowed to index the message boards, per /robots.txt. Which kind of pushes the boards a little below the "surface web".