Shared Ban Filters and Blacklists

[mcg13]

I'm currently running and maintaining three installations of IPB (two on one server and a third on another). New user registration for the sole purpose of posting spam is getting completely out of control. I'm now spending about an hour everyday creating new ban filters, because each addition has to be done three times using three different admin interfaces.

Having said that, I would love to see a way to manage a single ban filter list that could be shared amongst all of my IPB installations. Adding this feature could also allow multiple IPB owners to work together to combat spam on their sites.

Taking it a step even further, I think a lot of IPB owners could benefit from an automatically updated "blacklist" of known spammers and hackers (IP addresses, e-mail addresses or domains and user names). The blacklist gets applied to everyone's ban filter list, if they're subscribed to that feature. And, of course, any address on that list could be unblocked manually by any of the admins on their installation.

By the time a spammer has registered, validated his e-mail address and posted his link-infested message about porn or prescription drugs on my board(s), chances are extremely high that he's done the exact same thing on 100 or more other IPBs out there already. The next time you get hit with spam, Google the e-mail address for proof.

Just a thought.