Banning

The masks on this page, can also be used with the ignore facility.

It sounds easy to ban someone from channel, and it is, the hard part comes when you want to place a good ban. To be able to make good bans it is essential to understand the mechanism behind a ban, and the levels of ban's.

A ban is placed on a mask, a mask it more or less precise parts of the user address. There are 2 types of complete user addresses :

nick ! userid @ port . host.com
nick ! userid @ 000.000.000.port

The difference is that in one case the address is numeric, and in the other case the address is letters. When what happens has to do with if the server is able to resolve the numeric address or not, this is not important when talking ban's, the important part is to notice, that the port number is at the end when it is a numeric address and rigth after @ in the other case. In the example the 000.000.000 is the host part of the address.

A ban can be placed on all 4 levels, in this table you can see the level and comments about that level.

Nick

To place a ban on a nick, is good if you want to keep certain nicks out of the channel. If it is a person you want to keep out then this is a very weak ban, cause all it takes to avoid it, is for the person to change his/her nick.

Userid

To place a ban on a Userid, is slightly more effective, then a nick ban. The person banned will have to disconnect the net, and change it, then reconnect to avoid the ban.
One thing that also has to be considered if using the userid only, when banning that is that many different people are using the same userid, and that way you might end banning people without meaning to.

Port

To ban using the port only is a _bad_ idea, and should not be used ever. Believe it or not, there are only 255 different port numbers, and banning some will cut a lot of people from entering the channel.

Host

To ban a total host, is dramatic to do, because it means that no one from that host is able to join the channel. Imagine a ban set on aol.com, that would mean no one on aol, will be able to join your channel. But sadly it is sometimes nessesary to do a host ban. If it is nessesary, it should be considered to write an email to the provider, informing them, that if they get complaints the action is taken because of 1 individual, supply information of time, and the address used. Not many ISP's will take notice when comming from 1 channel, but if they get enough they might act.

Remember the more information that is supplied in the ban mask, the more precise the ban will be, and a precise ban, is easier to avoid then a wide ban.

Combinning the different levels gives you around 10 different ways to ban a person, but in the daily work, your should be able to do with a couple of bans.
In the following table, we put in a suggestion on bans that you can use in the daily work. You can use other then these but, those should work for most cases.
In the examples we use a person with the nick Lamer using a fictitious address making his complete mask information :

Lamer!bad@ppp210.ircfool.org
and fictitious numeric address :
Lamer!bad@180.092.052.210

NickBan

/mode #channel +b Lamer
This ban is easy to avoid, but can serve as a warning.
This ban is also good to use with a time limit, if people are using the option "rejoin on kick" that some clients offer, this will keep them out so they don't automaticly rejoin.

Precise
Userid Ban

/mode #channel +b *!*bad@ppp210.ircfool.org
With this ban, the person will have to disconnect and reconnect, and change his userid to avoid it. It will also be avoided if the person redials his isp, because we have the port in there.
This ban will not do for permanent banning, due to that we have the port number in there, but will give a clear signal.

Wider
Userid Ban

/mode #channel +b *!*bad@*.ircfool.org
The port is replaced with a wildcard now, and the ban will prevent, any user from ircfool.org using the userid bad to join the channel.
The user can still disconnect to change his userid, but few will do that.

Host Ban

/mode #channel +b *!*@*.ircfool.org
This ban is a serious one, but with real lamers, there are really no other way. The person can still avoid the ban, but to do so would have to use another isp.
Remember if you set this kind of ban, you might be able to lift it after a couple of days, to avoid too many ppl not being able to join.

If you wonder why a wildcard is used on the userid the *!*, then it is because that you will see sometimes the userid is proceeded by a ~ (tilde) this means that the identd server has been disabled, it is an area to big to cover on this page, but the wildcard is there to ensure that we get the ban activated with or without ~.

Sometimes when you try to set a ban, you will find that it is not working, the server simply refuse to set the ban. This is caused by the servers, it refuses to add a ban mask if it have something conflicting with the coverage of what you are trying to add.

So if you have banned *!*bad@ppp210.ircfool.org then you can't ban *!*@*.ircfool.org because the one you try to add, would cover what you have there already. To add the second ban, you need to lift the first one first.

Some suggestions to remember about banning :

Never use a more powerful ban mask then needed.

Don't remove a ban set by others, if it is not causing problems the one setting it had a reason to do so, ask for the reason before removing the ban.

Try to clean the ban list, often, keep it up to date, because it is a tool to keep some bad people out of the channel. It is not a storage place for outdated bans.

Try to keep a backup of the ban list. The channel banlist will be cleared if the channel is empty.