User tells me they are banned, and I have no idea why...

Greetings,

I've got a user writing me that when they log into the forum they get a "you have been banned" message.

However, I can't find their email address in the "Banning" list. If I go to the "users" section and try to look up their account, I can't find it. (tried both "top level" and "blocked" filters).

I suppose that the IP address they're connected from might be in the list, but I don't know what that is (I wrote back and asked if they knew their public IP address, I could look for that).

Otherwise, I'm at a loss.

Any suggestions?

It's also possible to ban by user ID, so be sure to check for that as well. But it seems unlikely to be the problem here, if they're not banned by email.

As an admin you can see the IP address of where people posted from - maybe check a few of the IP addresses that user posted from, to see if one or more of those are listed in the Banning list.

If I go to the "users" section and try to look up their account, I can't find it.

That is really odd. Note that you can search the user list by email, so you should find it that way. Or maybe the user misremembered under which email address they registered?

udittmer wrote:As an admin you can see the IP address of where people posted from - maybe check a few of the IP addresses that user posted from, to see if one or more of those are listed in the Banning list.

It does not appear that they've posted anything yet. In fact, I suspect that they were logging into to the forum for the first time. (I recently transitioned to a new server and JForum installation, but I only kept the accounts of users who had posted something in the past. This was because I previously had a home-rolled SSO solution that automatically created a forum account for every user account on my product website, but that just resulted in tens of thousands of spam accounts being created.)

udittmer wrote:

If I go to the "users" section and try to look up their account, I can't find it.

That is really odd. Note that you can search the user list by email, so you should find it that way. Or maybe the user misremembered under which email address they registered?

I agree, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if they're trying to use a different email address. Especially because the email addy they gave me isn't in my product account database either.

Latest update: They wrote me with their IP address and it was, indeed, in the list of "banning" IP addressed. They also noted that their ISP occasionally reassigns IP addresses, so it's possibly they just got one with an abuse history. Anyway, I removed the IP address from the "banning" list and am waiting to hear more.

They also noted that their ISP occasionally reassigns IP addresses, so it's possibly they just got one with an abuse history.

IP reassignment is common for both DSL and cable. Although users usually keep their IPs for weeks or months at a time these days, at some point it does get changed.