Why doesn't sythe mac address ban?

The internet does not work that way.

Research what a MAC address is then you can answer your own question.

I'll give you it in brief here, since you're a donator:

Imagine the internet was a telephone system. Your IP address is analogous to your telephone number. Your MAC address is analogous to your telephone's hardware ID. That is: the hardware identification code your local telephone exchange uses to identify your phone in order to send calls to you and receive calls from you. Thus, if a distant exchange were to ban the hardware ID that you are apparently 'calling from' they would only end up blocking their own exchange or an intermediate exchange. This is because the hardware IDs are only used in the link layer. That is the protocol layer where any two pieces of hardware talk to eachother.

Thus: Banning MAC addresses only makes sense in certain games where the game client reliably reports the computer's MAC address (network hardware ID) to the final host (via IP). For webservers however the only MAC address we ever receive is that of our ISP/datacenter, and banning that would simply mean no traffic ever got through again.

As another analogy imagine that you had a peer to peer postage system. If you want to send me a letter you write my name (IP address), and your postman's ID (MAC address) on a letter and pass it to that postman. He crosses out his postman ID, and puts the next postman's ID on the letter, then passes it to the next postman, and so on. Until the letter finally arrives in my mail box, with my postman's ID on it. If I then banned any letters received from my postman's ID I would no longer receive letters.

Computer networks are complicated and difficult to explain in simple terms. If you are interested then read up on them. Wikipedia articles are usually good.

 

I'm surprised that black tux does not know this.

Clearly they were banning netmasks. VPN companies will usually buy IP address blocks like any other hosting or ISP-like company. You can ban these ranges. We do this all the time on sythe.org.

More info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing

I'll give you an example:
Suppose we wanted to ban all hidemyass.com's possible IP addresses. First we lookup the details of one of their IPs in the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) database, which gives us something like this:

Then we find the smallest most specific network range (as all higher networks tend also to be listed) and block it.

In this case it would be 50.115.40.96/28 -- which means all addresses starting with 50.115.40.96 exclusive of the last four bits. In otherwords this would block addresses in the range 50.115.40.96 to 50.115.40.111 -- which are all the addresses this company owns in this block -- which probably would constitute a blanket ban on this company accessing the site.