If your blog achieve even a hint of popularity, you’re going to get hit by comment spammers. These bots go all over the blogsphere to spam blog after blog. Spam filters like Askimet does a great job preventing the comments from showing up.
Akismet has protected your site from 873,646 spam comments already, but there’s nothing in your spam queue at the moment.
The main problem with Askimet is it places all the spam comments in the spam folder for you to check out. Because Askimet is not perfect, you need to check the spam folder to see if any legit comments got caught. This isn’t a problem when you get a few spams per day. However, when you wake up to 200+ comments in the spam folder each day, it can be a real time waster to check through it.
Most of the time, the spams are sent from the same person/site. When I see the same IP show up in Askimet over and over again, I would ban that IP by editing my htaccess file. The main problem with this setup is I need to fire up my FTP program every time I need to ban an IP and I really don’t like editing my htaccess file. There had to be a better way!
Twitter To The Rescue
@JohnChowDotCom (John Chow) says:Is there a wordpress plugin to ban the IP of spammers from commenting?
Twitter has proven to be an awesome business tool for me. I sent out the above tweet this afternoon and got a bunch of answers. Three Twitter users replied with the exact plugin I was looking for. Shout outs to
@simpso1ja, @askbillmitchell and @krystyl for the heads up on WP-Ban.
WP-Ban WordPress Plugin
WP-Ban by Lester Chan allows you to ban users by IP, IP Range, host name and referer URL. Banned IPs are prevented from visiting your blog. If they can’t visit, they can’t leave any spam. The plugin will display a custom ban message when the banned IP attempts to visit and leave a comment. My message reads:
Die Spammer! Die!!
You can exclude certain IPs from being banned. There are also statistics to show how many times a banned IP attempts to visit your blog. WP-Ban allows wildcard matching too.
Since activating WP-Ban two hours ago, the above banned IPs have attempted to access my blog 126 times. That would have added another 126 comments to my spam folder if the plugin wasn’t installed. If you’re getting a bunch of spam comments from the same IPs over and over again, WP-Ban is a great way to lock them out!
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One of the most common complaint (or excuse) I hear from potential new bloggers is they don’t know how to install WordPress. Terms like FTP and CPanel are like a foreign language and setting up a database might as well be setting up the space shuttle for a launch. Because of the technology barrier, many would-be bloggers never start their blogs...