Rangeban

This article is about jan-jans Archive every post (You) see. Read the banpage to remember that they do it for free.

A range-ban is a type of punishment handed down by 4chan and Sharty moderators. Unlike a normal ban, a range of several IP addresses associated with a user is blocked from posting preemptively. This is needed to ban some users whose internet connections assign IP addresses dynamically. A range-ban may only apply to certain boards.

Types

Full

Completely prevents posting. OP posts, image/file replies, and text replies are blocked.

Uploading files

Blocks any posts that have a file, which also includes new threads since they require an image/file. Thanks moot.

Creating new threads

Prevents the IP range from creating new OPs. Users of the range can still post images/files in replies to other threads.

Reputation-based

Can be any of the aforementioned types, however it's based on a cookie called 4chan_pass and wears away when your cookie has enough activity (post count, days since cookie was created). Applied to generals and to threads when they see the real IP ban doesn't help, e.g. from long-term ban evaders IP hopping from residential proxies 10 + times per hour. This type of ban always mentions you can bypass it by verifying your email. This type is still somehow related to IP as if you keep rotating IP, the accumulated reputation from the cookie will reset and you get it again. Mitigable by pre-building IP+cookies for the general you are attacking.

Controversies

>BUY THE PASS GOY

There is a popular conspiracy theory claiming that moderators are intentionally trigger-happy when issuing range-bans because it will force more posters to purchase a 4chan pass.

The range-ban system in general has been criticized because innocent users who happen to share an ISP with rule-breaking posters become banned despite having done nothing wrong.

Sometimes entire countries or large swathes of them are rangebanned, usually Finland and India, as part of the temporary extended length global rules to fight spam and build back better. Denmark was rangebanned temporarily when a Danish /pol/ user spammed flat earth infographics redpills for several weeks.

On the wiki

MediaWiki software allows admins to ban entire CIDR IP ranges. The maximum allowed range is /16, which includes around 65.5 thousand addresses.

Trivia

• They will never rangeban Israel.