We've had the unfortunate experience of having a bad user show up on our board, that we are currently taking legal actions against regarding some Ebay auctions and some trademark/copyright infringements. Anyway, this user has been posting some stuff on our board, using multiple usernames of course, and I'm trying to get as many of his "names" as possible.

He's on a cable modem in Canada, so his IP is static, which I managed to notice just from following the threads, and then running the IP. But, he's also using his AOL account (cheap anonymizer?!), so searching the IP is gonna be a little trickier.

Now, to my question: I tried searching his static IP from the Admin area under the registration IP but it won't pull anything up, even though I know there are some present. Also, I've noticed problems when trying to search email addresses and such. The search/edit thing doesn't seem to always work correctly or smoothly...is there a way to do these searches directly through mySQL? Will it net the same results? Also, any tips/ideas on hunting this guy down on our site?

Anyone know anything about business law...

You can do queries like this:

SELECT * FROM w3t_Users WHERE U_RegIP='1.2.3.4'
SELECT * FROM w3t_Users WHERE U_RegIP LIKE '1.2.%'

(% matches any string)

Recent versions of phpMyAdmin have a global search function, which can easily search multiple columns across multiple tables for a specified string. It's probably rather I/O-intensive, but it can be handy if you're looking for something and don't want to spend the time to construct precise queries.

Thanks for the reply! Now, is there a way to find posts made from a certian IP address?

Also....Lisa P's mod here.

Has a nifty function... you can see all the IP addresses that a user has used.

Try this MySql search:

SELECT * FROM w3t_Posts WHERE B_IP LIKE '1.2%'

KLB
www.sbhonline.com