You ban someone and they are back in an hour under a new name. Minecraft accounts are cheap and easy to make, so this is a normal outcome rather than a failure — and the useful responses are more boring than the dramatic ones.
Your options, honestly
| Option | How well it works |
|---|---|
| The allowlist | Completely. Nobody you did not invite can connect at all. |
| An account ban | Precise, and trivially evaded with a second account. |
| An IP ban | Sometimes effective, and catches people who did nothing. See below. |
| A punishment plugin with alt detection | Reasonable. It links accounts by connection details and flags likely alts. |
| Trying to identify them personally | Not your job, often against platform rules, and usually wrong. |
Households share an address, mobile connections rotate them constantly, and whole neighbourhoods can sit behind one carrier address. An IP ban that seems to work may also be silently blocking a sibling, a housemate, or a stranger in the same city. Use them briefly and deliberately, not as a default.
What actually ends it
- Turn the allowlist on if the server is private
This is not a workaround, it is the answer. Evasion is impossible against a list of people you invited by name.
- Stop reacting publicly
For a certain kind of returning player, the reaction is the point. A silent ban and no acknowledgement is far less rewarding than an argument in chat.
- Log what happened
A short note in your ban reason with the date makes the pattern obvious when the fourth account appears, and lets any staff member act without asking you.
- Consider a join requirement
Requiring a Discord link or a short application filters casual evasion completely, at the cost of friction for genuine new players. That trade is worth it on some servers and not others.
Someone who came back to provoke a reaction leaves when there is not one. Someone who came back because they liked the server may be worth an actual conversation about coming back properly — that outcome is more common than it sounds.