Thread

Hi Guys,

Sorry to dig this one up again, but we’re having the same issue described in this http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/105128/P0/ tread. Our client is having trouble adding new IP addresses to Banned IP list via the EE control panel.

This has been happening for a while now and it’s definitely caused by the $conf[‘banned_ips’] variable within the config.php file. If I delete the variable including the IPs, everything seems to start working again for a few weeks but then it stalls and I need to delete the variable again to allow the client to ban IP addresses successfully.

They’re still using EE 1.6.7 and 2.1.1 of the Discussion Forum. Is this likely to be a problem that would be fixed with an update?

The client is banning users via the EE Control Panel but also has a small team of moderators that are banning members through the Discussion Forum front-end. Is it possible that one or the other method is causing some conflicts and stoping the banning method from working?

Look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Cheers,
Gary

Hi, Gary. The first thing to do is to have them upgrade to 1.7.0. How many IPs are they banning? Is it the sheer number of them?

Hi Sue,

Thanks for the response.

The client has 442 IP addresses in the banned list. Is that considered a large number? The client is banning users because they’re either a spammer or behaving inappropriately. The site is for women only, aged 16 or over. The client takes this very seriously and is doing everything she can to protect the forum members and create a safe, friendly community… I think a lot of men are getting banned 😉

We’re using a slightly customised Forum template. http://www.britishcurlies.co.uk/curl_forum/ . As you can see, nothing major here, just cosmetic changes. I would need to be sure that an upgrade to the latest forum compatible with EE 1.7 isn’t going to break…and is likely to fix the banning problem.

Let me know your thoughts.

Thanks again,
Gary

Gary ,

The latest version of the forum is 2.2.0 which is recommended you update to along with the EE1.7.0 update.

If you keep your theme intact and back it up you should be fine. That goes for any update. Make a backup of everything. Be sure to follow the version update docs as opposed to the build updates docs

You can see the changelog of releases for the forum here

There are one or two things to change in your theme when updated. They are here in the Version notes

Let us know if you have any other concerns regarding an update.