Forum

I think it would be pretty cool if we could define custom "ban" pages that are displayed to people that have been ban by Hiawatha with their ban reason.

I think it's wise to spend as little time as possible at clients who have been banned. They have been banned for a reason, so they're probably up to no good. I've done some testing with sending a ban-message in the past and seen that sending a response before the request has been fully received doesn't always work. Specially if you close the connection afterwards, even if the request has not fully been sent. Waiting for a complete request is not something you want, because you want to spend as little time as possible at banned clients. Therefore, I've decided to simply immediately close the connection for banned clients and I have no reason to change that behaviour.

The only foreseeable issue I can see with not giving clients a "banned reason" is that if a potential customer were somehow banned for no reason, they'd see the site as being dead and never return.

At least with a simple HTML ban page, it'd be possible to tell them why they cannot access the site.

I do not agree. If I want to visit a website, and it does not respond, I think: "Hmm, probably network connection issue. I'll try again in 15 minutes". If I see a "You have been banned" message, I think: "WTF? What for? What a crappy shit website."

And clients never get banned for no reason. It's up to you to set sane ban values. Set the ban trigger high enough and the ban time low. This will leave innocent visitors alone and annoy hackers enough to make them leave.