Banning

[porcelina]

Hey everyone,

I'm having a little problem with users stealing photos from my gallery and putting them on their website.  I'd like to ban these people from my gallery, however, all I know for sure are their email addresses, not their IP addresses.  Also, there are over 500 users in my gallery so searching through every single name can be super tedious.  Is there any way to do a search for the email addresses people put in their profiles in order to ban a username?

Any information would be really helpful.

Thanks!

[Joachim Müller]

Best solution would be to use a third-party tool like phpMyAdmin to browse the database. However, I don't think that it will be worth the effort, with IP addresses being assigned dynamically for most clients, ban by IP is a lame tool that you can hardly use to stop those leechers. Instead, I suggest placing a watermark on your pics.

[porcelina]

Thanks for the info.  Yeah, I have been putting watermarks on them, and this person has been removing them and putting her own in their place :/

[Joachim Müller]

Then I suggest you review your watermark: a good watermark can not be removed without crippling the original image. Take a look at the watermarks applied by professional stock photography pages, like http://www.stockxpert.com/browse.phtml?f=view&id=20373201
As I said initially: banning by IP address is hardly an option. If you want advice on your watermarked images and how to improve your watermarks, post a link to your gallery for a start.