After my host blaming vbulletin and vbulletin blaming my host i started to get a bit annoyed and went in search of some answers as i was 100% sure it was not a vbulletin isolated problem and it was a server config issue.
What does this problem cause your forums to do ? It makes all of your members/visitors seem as they have the same IP address as the server , what does that mean ? It means that if a member forgets his password and triggers the vbulletin strikes system once those strikes have had 5 strikes it quite literally blocks every single member until those strikes have gone after 15 mins, however if you run a busy forum every time someone trys to login those 15 mins start all over again so this is a massive problem.
Not only that but if you run a policy of no multiple accounts on the forum and have a multi account detection which is based on IP address it wont work because it cant see the users real IP addresses.
There would also be a problem with banning Users IP address because the IP address that is being seen by vbulletin is the server IP address so if you ban the IP you ban every single user that has logged in since this problem started.
These are the results that i have came up with and hopefully this thread will help all those people that face it in the future.
Adding this line of code to the top of your config.php :
This works perfectly and resolves the IP addresses correctly ,HOWEVER why should you be happy with editing files when its not the fault of the script you are using , its a server config error so instead of doing the above code change ask your hosts to look at this page :
It provides a module which apparently fixes the problem at server level rather than editing local account files. There are a number of other fixes which seem to work also which means editing vbulletin core files but remember every time vbulletin do an upgrade ( which is every month or two on average ) you’ll have to do the same edits again and again and again so make sure you get the fix at server level rather than editing files.