Why Ban a User?

As a moderator, you have the ability to ban individual users. Those who are causing trouble by purposefully vandalizing the site or inciting flame wars are the usual candidates for such punishment. After they are banned, they can no longer make any contributions on the site.

How To Ban a Registered User

You may ban a registered user by going to their profile page and clicking on "Change Permissions". There, you will be given several options, one of which is to ban the user.

How To Unban a User

You can unban a user that you have previously banned by going to their profile page and clicking the Unban button. You can use the Banned accounts report to see a list of banned users.

Banning IP Addresses

Many acts of vandalism are not committed by registered users, but anonymous ones. It is possible to ban an IP address the same way you can ban a registered user. However, we urge you to do this only as a last resort. Many Internet service providers only assign a certain amount of IP addresses, meaning that more than one person could have the same address. Essentially, you could be banning potential, and innocent, users of your site. However, extreme cases may call for it.

Steps:

1. Click on "complete history" near the bottom of the page.
2. Find the anonymous edit of the user that you need to ban
3. Click on their IP address (a series of numbers such as 127.0.0.1)
4. Click on the Ban button

Note: You can not ban Anonymous Commentors