We've been having issues lately with banned members returning under alternate usernames. The traditional methods of controlling these people--IP bans, e-mail address bans, and username bans--don't really work for persistent trolls, and spending hours locking accounts and cleaning up threads is frustrating for admins. As the site grows and we attract more bad elements, this will be a growing problem.

One thing that makes it particularly easy for spammers and trolls to keep coming back is their option to create unlimited e-mail addresses thanks to the abundant availability of "freemail" providers such as Hotmail, gmail, and Yahoo.

I'm considering making it a requirement that new users provide non-freemail addresses. New e-mail addresses are harder to get from ISPs and it's easy enough to ban entire domains if a user owns their own web site and can create unlimited aliases within their domain.

There are a fair amount of freemail addresses currently in use by our members, so implementing a "no freemail" policy would affect many of you. That's the primary reason I've held off on this idea until now. Also, I want to encourage new membership, and forcing people to provide "real" e-mail addresses can be problematic because people tend to be more protective of their primary e-mail address. They certainly have no need to fear spam from this site, but I can understand their concerns.

What do you think of this solution?