What do we do when we have a user who is spamming or in some manner making life hard for you as webmaster?

I sometimes delete the account and then have to go back and manually delete each post the spammer made. Of course, the spammer just re-joins and starts again. Sound familiar? Most forum software (Simple Machines, for one) allow you to delete an account and all the posts of that person with one click. I wish XOOPS had that feature.

You can ban IPs, but that only works if the person has a unique IP.

How about this --I haven't tried it yet. You create a group, let's call it "Doghouse". When you run into a problem user, you change his group from "registered user" or whatever to "Doghouse." In group settings you limit this person however you think appropriate. Certainly you would take away his ability to post in your forums.

Has anyone tried this? Any other suggestions?

I am looking the same. It's very bad situation and I don't know how can be handled

if it's always the same person, you can monitor him regularly.. check his IP and you'll get to see a pattern of IP's that he has used, they will repeat eventually..

compare those IP's with other people on your site & check if any are the same, if they are you have a problem in blocking that ip because u could block legit users.. but if his IP's never match any of your others, then you can at least ban those that don't match..

the other way is if you have a busy board with many users, make a few more moderators, have moderators that can monitor your site at different times of day.

Have a look through This thread

and also This one

There is no single solution, it depends on the way your site is set up.

The two group model you are thinking about works well for me as detailed in the second link to thread.