Banlist Improvements

Banning users becomes quite popular sometimes. Especially on e107 websites that have a massive community, the chance on abuse is luring and inevitable.

Banning users becomes quite popular sometimes. Especially on e107 websites that have a massive community, the chance on abuse is luring and inevitable. The v0.7 ways on banning were sufficient, but the devs recognized some improvements should be part of v0.8.

It is possible to create 'Ban Types'. Each Ban Type can contain an optional message that will be displayed to the banned user. Besides that it is possible to make 'internal' notes; that won't be displayed to the banned ones. Visitors can be banned on IP address, Reverse DNS, email or host address. Wild cards can be defined for any of these as well. To ban a user by user name, one can go to the users admin page. New functionality for a temporary ban has been introduced. Each Ban Type can be bound to an exclusion period, which can be set in hours, days, weeks or (of course) indefinite.

Besides the blacklist method it is also possible to white-list visitors; by doing so you can prevent certain users from being excluded to access of your website. White-listing is possible on IP address or e-mail address which are explicitly permitted.
The whitelist takes priority over the ban list - it should not be possible for an address from this list to be banned. All addresses must be manually entered. Of course a certain responsibility comes with this administrative function. It should be handled with extreme caution.

Furthermore in e107 0.8 the banlist has been extended with an interface for banlist import/export. It should become more easy to import existing banlists into your specific (starting) e107 environment. This opens the possibility for sharing community banlists, copying banlists between your sites, etc. All in all the new banlist provides some nifty features to even better protect your e107 website.