Locking yourself out of forum accounts

Forums are a great social tool and are used by many users such as to form a community, support boards or even idea exchange boards but there are times when you may no longer want to log into the forum any more but yet, feel tempted to keep checking up on it.

While there are many reasons for this, I will not get into what reason you may have but to start with you could ask an administrator on the forum to lock you out or delete your account. Now if they are like me, I will not delete a forum account at all and even if they are spammers etc I do ban accounts within reasons.

But of course, if your account is not locked out then you may be tempted to keep logging in each day and checking it. However, I am going to tell you a little solution that will lock you out of your account and make it so you can not access the forum for normal reasons.

Locking out your account

This part is likely the most essential part to you, it means that you can never post again without an administrator physically changing your password back. Now do be warned, that if you do not have a copy of the password and follow these steps, you will NEVER be able to log into the forum again (this naturally works for social networks, etc., but we are just focusing on forums here).

So right then, let us start. First, log into the forum that you wish to lock yourself out of. Most modern forum scripts such as bbPress, Invision Power Board, phpBB and so fore offers the user a control panel so that they can change the settings of the forum but most importantly allow us to change the password and the e-mail field.

The key to locking yourself out is merely changing the details to something you can no longer use after you changed the settings. To do this, we are going to be using two websites:

• Guerrilla Mail
• Gibson Research Corporation > GRC’s Ultra High-Security Password Generator

So, let’s first change our password on the forum we are trying to lock ourselves out of. Now, we need it changed to something that is both secure and something that very little can understand (basically, a password with no pattern). For this, we are going to use a web service from GRC. So, click the second link above and then copy the password that is listed as 63 random printable ASCII characters. A reason we are using these is that they do not offer the same password again to other people so therefore if you forget this, you can’t get back.

Now, the one I got is shown as an example of what to copy. Do NOT use it or locking yourself out will not work as you will just come back here and copy the password again.

nq;z0~,lrH~\wBx~HzY)\HqB;(O{c)’E3fI1|l__g!kmTLN#,>LfUP2qJ3″‘Pc}

This part is simple. Just go onto the forum user control panel and go to password or something like that. Now just paste in the password you got from that website and then do the same to the confirmation field. Now, most modern forums will accept it and if it did, then great you can move on to the next part. If not, go back and use the one listed as 64 random hexadecimal characters (0-9 and A-F). Once again, the example is below:

42BBC6989990185BB740521B74177003F5372E6B56C2E57621D863C456891C60

Now, you have changed the password it is time to make sure we can never reset our password via e-mail. Now, this is simple again, go to the user control panel and go to change e-mail address. Now click the first link I gave above and fill in one of the options. Once you got the e-mail address, just use that e-mail address to change your e-mail address too. Once you have done this, go and click your temp e-mail inbox and click on any confirmation link. Once it is done, log out and as long as you did not copy that password anywhere then you will no longer be able to log into the forum.

Now, you have just an hour to regain access should you want to. Should you fail to do it within an hour, you will no longer be able to reset your password and see that you can no longer remember the password and that is it. You will be locked out until someone can physically change your password.

Blocking access to the forum

But of course, this isn’t always sometimes enough. You may be tempted to keep checking on the forum so now, we are going to block your access to the website. Naturally, you will need administrator/root rights to block yourself but if you are at work, just tell them you are accessing a forum during your work time and you will notice your Internet access just disappears and also likely your job/career.

Now, all you do is open up certain files depending on what operating system you have and edit according to the example and that is it, you will no longer be able to access the forum without undoing the steps you have just taken. Make sure to use the IP address – 255.0.0.0 and not 127.0.0.1. I will not get into the technical reason for that but basically because it is the TCP endpoint by default.

Windows 95, 98, Me
%WinDir%\

NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 7
%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\

Macintosh
9 and earlier
System Folder: Preferences or System folder

Mac OS X, iPhoneOS
/private/etc/hosts

Linux, BSD, etc
/etc/hosts

Novell NetWare
SYS:etc\hosts

OS/2 & eComStation
"bootdrive":\mptn\etc\

Symbian
Symbian OS 6.1-9.0
C:\system\data\hosts

Symbian OS 9.1+
C:\private\10000882\hosts (AllFiles capable only)

Enjoy being locked out of the forum but to be honest, couldn’t you have just closed down the website for a bit?