quote:

You would like us to "permanently" block a user from the website
We get this request a lot in regard to abusive users, spammers, scammers, and generally anyone who is disliked by the person writing in. Unfortunately preventing someone from making accounts on the website, while sounding like a very sensible idea to many users, is in reality a completely irrational concept in regard to today's Internet. To see why this is so, you must first understand that upwards of 96% of users browsing this (or any other) website are coming in from commodity broadband DSL and cable connections. In an effort to cut costs and reuse limited resources, Broadband Internet Service Providers (ISPs) long ago switched to using dynamic IP addresses for these connections which rotate frequently and can be changed effortlessly by the customer. Blocking one of these IP address would not achieve the objective of keeping the intended person off the site and would create confusion for the next innocent person who attempts to access the site with that assigned IP. Furthermore, because many ISPs such as AOL use "proxy" IP addresses, blocking one IP address in the hope of keeping a single user off of a website can unintentionally block hundreds of thousands of innocent users in seconds. Nevertheless, some websites continue to perpetuate the IP blocking myth by threatening to "permanently" block the IP address any user who dares to break their rules. This is purely a scare tactic rendered toothless by the realities today's broadband world or, as Shakespeare might say, sound and fury signifying nothing.