This is something that has been suggested a while before when some idiot spammed the forums accusing someone of cheating with proof about as strong as a feather, but another situation has come up that makes me now want to bring this up again.
Someone I’ve known on this site has been targeted by a banned user making multiple alt accounts (which all routinely have to be banned by site staff) to submit runs to games that this person moderates for almost a year at this point.
IP blocking is a very simple thing to implement and prevents any ban evasion, as well as any site raids/targeted harassment as described above.
Speaking out of experience, IP banning is almost entirely useless and creates a ton of extra overhead for administrators. You'd also have to be blocking ranges which might also work against the site because blocking a range means any other valid user with an IP address in that range can't use their account too. But more importantly, any person with a small amount of knowledge on how a VPN works can easily circumvent an IP ban. You can probably see why IP bans are not a great way of handling bans. Neither is MAC-address banning. Yes, they might make things slightly more annoying for banned users, but the extra overhead and annoyances of maintaining said info probably are a bigger headache than the poor benefits it provides. The reality is that there just aren't good ways of dealing with ban evasions.
The one thing I could see "helping" (not fully solving the issue, as it's way more complicated than just suggesting "just do this thing 4Head" solutions) is some sort of 2FA to post in Forums.
Say that you need to verify your account via email to be allowed to post in the forums first. Have an authy-esque of sorts for that. And for "new" user (say, 30-60 days old accounts), make it so they have to verify their email to be allowed to write messages and they have to use a 2FA code every time they want to send a forum message. My making them waste their time - even if it's 1 minute per "attempt", most trolls just give up when it becomes too much effort, as stuff like this is appealing to them on the basis that it's fast and easy to do and repeat ad-nauseum. They will eventually run out of emails to use, or at least run out of patience to create emails they have to check on everytime they want to post something. Especially given they're probably unsupervised little billies using their parents' computer.
@SkittlesCat83, yes, I'm sure there are a lot of people like me who hang out in the forums and don't submit runs to their profile. It's not a foolproof system. Some people might just not want to record or submit runs to leaderboards on the site, and banning them because of that system isn't exactly the best idea. There needs to be a better system to block bots rather than just submitting a run.
@CyanWes, I also do that, where I don't submit runs and talk on the forums. Also, half of the site's staff also do this💀
