It was one of my most toughest decisions in my 8 years of online media entrepreneurship to start banning users of suspicious activity. In the Vidgle division of Jenthony today, we completed the setup of a banning system that would block users by their IP address and/or nameserver. Banning users hasn’t been into high consideration for years.
The last time it was consideration was back in August 2003, a Texas man was sending threatening messages to me on our website forums for WRAJ Internet Radio and through email. In some of the messages, he sent emails of very strong languages and notes saying that he was going to chase me down and kill me. And news broke out within 24 hours that he was arrested after threatening to kill a radio personality. It was during the court cases that the man states that he hates the large media. When my evidence came up during the trail (since we submitted all emails and system logs to federal court), he attacked me because WRAJ Internet Radio at the time was beginning to form a corporation by 2005. Instead, WRAJ Internet Radio was purchased by Jenthony Enterprises, Inc. in 2005 instead of forming its own company. Before the man was arrested, our old hosting provider did not allow us to “block” connections to an IP address or user. Today, our hosting provider allows banning disconnections from certain IP addresses.
Now in 2010, we are beginning to fully implement a banning system because of an investigation we conducted in November. A group of “kids” who we were able to identify in our investigation, decided to go on a one-star vote for every video spree when we launched Vidgle’s 2.0 engine back in September. And till this day, they vote 1 stars on videos on a regular basis. Due to company privacy, I cannot post more information about this incident.
But for weeks, I had to decide of what we should do to conclude with this investigation. So instead, we decided to form the banning system so we can prevent future attacks. A lot of people would agree in the company’s decision to block IP addresses because of an incident like this would make our website more fair, especially on our rating system. So on Monday, Jenthony Enterprises, Inc. is changing its visitor agreement and privacy policy to prevent attacks like this on all of its online media properties.
On top of this message is what the banned user will get if the IP address he/she is using is banned. The user can see the report of why the IP addressis banned and can contact the IP Ban Manager to see if the ban can be lifted for that IP address. For laughs, the error 20102 came from Nintendo’s error code when a user would do “unauthorized activity.”
