Hi, wow, I can't believe that phpBB does not allow you to view IP addresses and ban them. That's a reason to spend the 80$ on Vbulletin right there, not to mention all the other good things about vb.

The IP bans will help as well as making people moderators whom you trust to have banning powers as well.
I was a member of Vbulletin forum and the owner had set up that regular members could 'bomb' a member into blackness if a mod or admin wasnt around to ban them.

The banning features are pretty slick on vBulletin. You can put unruly members who may be drinking on a saturday night into 'conventry' where they can post and read but all of their posts are temporarily unseen or permanent b/c you can view their posts to see how nuts they go b/c they dont know that they are in conventry.

The IP bans are somewhat effective against a casual antisocial individual but someone that has not too much knowledge can mask their IP address through proxy serving and surf anonymously.

The moderators is where it is at I think, you can make it so they can delete a thread and delete the member or hang onto that power as well by creating a recycle bin forum. That's a forum where they can simply move a thread rather delete where only staff can view it. Then when you login you can review the thread and delete it rather giving that power over to someone who may have an itchy trigger finger and you not know about it.

Not sure about phpBB, but thanks for the thread, guess I am going to go for the vBulletin b/c of it like I should