One of the things phpBB does not provide for administrators is an easy way to search for forum users based on IP addresses. To perform such a search for an exact IP, one must first find a post made by a user from that address. That can rather difficult to accomplish in some cases, especially when dealing with dial up users, who may have hundreds of IPs on record.

IP Search adds a new section to the Administration Panel to make this easier. You can enter an IP address and get a list of everyone that has recorded activity from that address. You can also enter a host name to search; the hack will look up the IPs for that host and search for all of them. If a certain user is being a problem, you can view all of the IP addresses used for their account by entering their username, as well.

Two wild cards are supported in IP address searches, the * for matching many characters and the _ for matching single characters. This allows searches for IPs like 127*, 127.*.1, 127.0.*, 12_.0.0.1, 1_7.* and so on.