This thread is for questions for the tutorial "The basics of banning a user from your application".

http://www.fmsguru.com/showtutorial.cfm?tutorialID=29

Thanks for very interesting tutorial!
What are the other ways of banning a user? I suppose it all comes to identifying the user?

Asking because the IP way isn't convienient enough for me - some users can be hidden behind the NAT, so they share one public IP and the last thing i want is to ban them for nothing...
I thought about setting up a cookie and checking if it's present. Cookie can be very easily deleted, assuming the user's browser allows cookies, so this is not very good solution either...
Wondering if there is another way to identify the user?
The simplest way would be user authentication - we're banning user's account and that's it, no big deal.
But we're talking about "guest chat", without authentication, is there any reliable solution?

btw you're doing great job! keep it up! :)

Good point. Yes, you can set a shared object on the client side because most people aren't aware of SO's on the client side, just cookies in the browser, so they very rarely get deleted. Then check that before they connect up.

Thanks for the compliments :) Always nice to see.

That's briliant ...forgot about SOs for a moment :) Thank you very much!

If someone wants to extend this solution you may find this quite helpful - I did some reserch and found a very nice java applet which allows you to get user's local ip. Applet is very easy in use. Gathered data can be easily send to SWF via JavaScript. Here's the link:
http://reglos.de/myaddress/MyAddress.html

There's one disadvantage in using this. User can have disabled java in his browser or haven't got java installed at all - but this is unlikely, almost everyone has java (you can always check this via JavaScript)

I think the best way is to combine solutions, more work, but more efficient tool you'll get :)