[spam removed]
We got a spammer! :D
The last one banned was in June 30, 2014.
lol
Nice that we are hitting spammers list. We are getting popular.
it's a good practice to ban the spammers? I remember I read on smorg that is better to delete the accounts without ban
Yeah Spam !!!!
I'd imagine the suggestion behind remove don't ban is due to the re-use of IP's ... if you do a lot of banning you can start to block legit requests since the IP's are not static.
Of course this is my personal preference coming from my experience and it may be wrong.
On my forum, I tend to ban&delete.
Deleting an account removes any kind of information regarding that account, including emails and username.
From time to time, spammers tend to reuse their details, otherwise systems like StopForumSpam would not be able to prevent much. So, have the data "in the system" is not a bad thing. Unfortunately, most of the spammers tend not to appear twice on the same forum, for example from my database of banned emails (~260) only a limited bunch have more than 0 hits in the ban log, so most of them have never been re-used after the first time. And this is funnily true for TLDs like: *@*.cn, *@*.in, *@*.info, *@*.pl, *@*.ru, *@*.tk, *@*.vu that are banned, but nobody ever used.
Regarding the IP banning, it is a short-term potentially useful practice, only because it may be that in a short time frame (24/48 hours), the same IP (or closely related ones) may shoot a huge number of spam accounts. So it is moderately useful.
Another thing I tend to do (or better I tended to do in the past), was to ban the IP as well, then from time to time, run through the list of IPs and when noticing a group of similar IPs I was banning the entire range. Of course here I have some thousands of hits, but I can't tell if they are all spammers of maybe some legitimate user from China, Russia, Poland, etc.
I think banning the member is not useless, it keep a record that blocks any future attempt with the same data (better than nothing). Banning the IP is likely useless, to the point that I'm almost tempted to suggest its removal (especially considering the future IPv6 situation that will make the IP banning completely useless, even only for the amount of IPs to ban and keep track of).
That said, the fact that at sm.org there is this suggestion of "banning is useless" is still puzzling me, because one of the moderation boards at sm.org is "banning requests" and any ban request is (or was) approved and hopefully added to the ban list. And the account (as far as I remember) are not deleted, but I may be wrong on that.
So another double standards from the SMF team (actually I have an idea of the "why" they started saying so, but I'll keep for me :P).