Good Afternoon to you all.

Thank you for your participation and vigilance in helping us keep our forums clean. As you are all aware, the board has been "spammed" by members who have had their privileges suspended in the recent past; namely dinkie and borredo1/elimanning.

Please be informed that we have traced these two users digital footprint by following their IP maskers back to their ISP. Both have had their Internet Service Providers contacted and they will be dealt with from their end (due to privacy issues, the users ISP cannot disclose personal data without a court order).

We do anticipate everyones patience and we would like everyone to know that we are doing everything we can to block these users from tormenting our site.

Any Internet service provider uses IP addresses to locate and talk to each other on the Internet, much the same way people use phone numbers to locate and talk to one another on the telephone. When you want to visit whatis.com, your computer asks a domain name system (DNS) server (think telephone information operator) for the correct dotted quad number (think phone number) for whatis.com and your computer uses the answer it receives to connect to the whatis.com server.

It would be simple if every computer that connects to the Internet could have its own static IP number, but when the Internet was first conceived, the architects didn't foresee the need for an unlimited number of IP addresses. Consequently, there are not enough IP numbers to go around. To get around that problem, many Internet service providers (including AOL and Shaw) limit the number of static IP addresses they allocate, and economize on the remaining number of IP addresses they possess by temporarily assigning an IP address to a requesting Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) computer from a pool of IP addresses. The temporary IP address is called a dynamic IP address.

Hence we would have to block a range of IP addresses to properly dispose of these two members. By doing so however, we might potentially block an IP address, or a range of IP addresses which an existing user may use to access our site. Hence we have been blocking IP ranges specifically accessed by dinkie and by borredo1/elimanning1 mannually, to avoid any inconvenience to other members within AGORACOM.

I understand that the above is indeed a mouthful of information, however if anyone has any inquiries, I'd be happy to help.

Thank you all again for your patience regarding this matter, and for your continued participation within the AGORACOM Community.

Regards,

Andreas Marouchos

AGORACOM Community Director