Ban IPs

1. Overview
2. How to Ban a customer
3. List of currently active bans
4. How to ban a range of IPs
5. List of expired/past bans

Overview

The ban feature is very useful if you ever meet with some unpleasant person/customer. If there is no other "more professional" way, how you can handle such a person on a live chat, you can simply use the ban feature for the specific IP addresses. The following screenshots explain this quick process below.

The ban action is applied to these communication channels: Chats, Contact forms, Calls started via "call us" buttons, Suggestions & Forum posts. Currently, you are unable to ban somebody from sending an email or calling your number via classic hardware phone with this ban feature, but you can always create a Rule which would delete or mark as spam any such ticket/email/call.

How to Ban a customer

There are two ways to Ban an IP address during a chat depending on whether the chat visitor is unidentified or an identified customer.

You can ban the visitor directly during an active chat session as shown on the above screenshots. This action will take immediate effect and end the chat while it also marks the chat ticket as spam.

Here is the whole process with full screenshots:

• first, you need to navigate into the top right corner, click the little "arrow" icon and choose the option "Ban user's IP" there:

• In the next dialog window, you just need to confirm your choice and choose the time period (mandatory) for which the user is banned. You can also write down some reason for banning the person (optional), ID of ticket in which the ban was given is reported automatically.

• After this confirmation, running chat with the banned visitor is resolved and you can see the system message about the banned visitor and it's IP address. 

List of currently active bans

You can see the currently banned IPs in the Configuration > Security > Banned IPs section. There is also an option on this screen to manually ban an IP or a range of IPs

Here is a description of the columns which you can see on this screen:

• Banned by = the name of the agent who banned the user
• Created = the time the ban was given
• Start IP & End IP = usually you'll have just the Start IP column filled in and it is the IP address of the customer you've banned. The End IP is filled in only if you have banned a whole interval of IP addresses (like a whole office/company which uses wide range of IP's), more on this below
• Valid until = the time until the ban action is active for specific IP address(es), if this is empty it means the ban is active indefinitely
• Reason = shows the reason entered by your agents when they banned a user
• Contact = the contact which was banned, only if the visitor was identified during chat when you banned him
• Conversation = the ID of the ticket in which the ban was given

There are two actions available in the grid:

• expire = when you want to "cancel" currently active ban
• edit = when you want to change (for example time period) currently active ban

How to ban a range of IPs

The Add ban button in the Banned IPs section lets you manually ban an IP address or a whole range/interval of addresses. On the below screenshot we are banning a range/interval of IPs from 95.10.45.150 to 95.10.45.250 until 30th March

List of expired/past bans

You can see the already expired/inactive bans which were given in the past at the Configuration > Security > Ban history screen. Column description can be found in the above section.