There may come a time when you wish to ban a user. The most common reason would be because they post innapropriate content in your forums. In System Admin -> Preferences -> General Settings there are two settings to enable in order to ban a user by his IP address. The first is to "Enable IP bans" - if this is set to yes, the subsequent text area ("Enter IP addresses that should be banned from the site") is evaluated for IP's to ban. Separate each IP with a | for multiple IP's. How to identify the IP of a user: Using recent release of forums NewBB and CBB There are a number of modules which do show you IP. If you want to ban a user it is ususally because he/she made some comment in Forum board. Newbb 2 and CBB have a setting to show an IP for moderators. Go to your Preferences for the forum module: Look for 'Show user IP' Setting 'YES' will show users IP to moderators If you don't use NewBB or CBB: There is the XMembers stats module but this shows the IP of a visitor when he/she is online only. Most of the times the last 2-3 digits are hidden. XMemberStats only shows the IP address of people who are currently online and can't tell you whether the person's IP changes. There is also PHP Stats: This is supported by an Italian site but this is this link to a Google English Translation The latest version can be downloaded from here (Suggestion submitted by McDonald) Using phpmyadmin If you can't find the option to switch on IP addresses, or you don't have it, you can look up the IP directly from the database if you have phpMyAdmin installed (which I think most people do). Just go to the database in which xoops is installed and look at the table called xoops_bb_posts. You can use SQL to find all the posts by a particular user. First find out their uid with SELECT * FROM xoops_users WHERE uname='' Then make a note of their uid and do SELECT * FROM xoops_bb_posts WHERE uid='' That will list all the posts by that user. You can see quite easily what their IP address is, and whether it changes a lot. If it changes (they have a dynamic IP), there's not much point banning them. (Suggestion submitted by tmb_ayebe)