Moderate/Ban commenters

What you do to ban commenters is delete them in wp-admin/Users.

This is my solution to excluding malicious commenters:

In the WordPress Web management UI
click on “options” in the mid-blue top toolbar
click on “discussion” in the dark blue lower toolbar

In the section titled “Before a comment appears” select the checkbox
“Comment author must have a previously approved comment “

This means that people who have a comment already posted see no change when they post a second or 100th comment. If someone does not have a comment already showing on your blog then their comment is ‘held for moderation’.

This is working better than ‘banning’ a specific email, IP, name or combination of these commenter-identifiers because no matter what the person submits, it is held for moderation if that commenter has not posted with those personal details before.

The downside is that you do have to approve all ‘first time’ comments, this is a small price to pay and may stop random people using your blog to publish abusive content.

I don’t understand vkaryl’s suggestion about deleting users because in my admin, I am the only user, so I can’t delete anyone.

Hope that helps, let me know ??

Wendyhouse,

That’s what I’ve been doing as well. But now I’ve been caught in the web of some piece-of-garbage spammer, and I’m in hell. In the past few days I’ve had to delete 230 of his/her comments.

None of them went live, because I do what you do and force them into a moderation queue. But at this point it is a HUGE nuisance.

Is there no simple way to ban a comment-spammer’s IP? Most of the time my system works fine for me, but all it takes is one machine slamming my comments-moderation-queue to create a large amount of pointless work for me. It would seem that there
would be some weapon for fighting this. They’re all from the same IP.

Is my only answer to use a plugin like Askimet? I’ve already had to disallow pings because of literally thousands of pieces of spam that had to be moderated (i.e. deleted).

It’s so frustrating. I wish there were some way to get even with these pointless scavengers….

But I’d settle for finding a way to keep them from wasting my time.

–dogra

use spam karma

it does the work for you.

Is there no simple way to ban a comment-spammer’s IP?

Options->Discussion->Comment Blacklist. Insert the IP here, on one line. Done.

However, in the long run, I really recommend using Bad Behavior and Akismet. The combination of these two solve almost all spam problems.

Otto42,

It says this above the Comment Blacklist box —

This is a list of words that you want completely blacklisted from your blog….

It says nothing about being able to paste IPs there. Should it say something? If so, why doesn’t it?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

whoami,

use spam karma

I guess I may have to…. Or Akismet plus Bad Behavior….

In later versions of WordPress, that wording is as follows:

Comment Blacklist

When a comment contains any of these words in its content, name, URL, e-mail, or IP, it will be marked as spam. One word or IP per line. It will match inside words, so “press” will match “WordPress”.

The fact of the matter is that IP checking DOES work if you put them there, so just don’t question it, yeah? ??

The fact of the matter is that IP checking DOES work if you put them there, so just don’t question it, yeah? ??

Ha! Okay. I just want to stop this one jerk, for the time being, so I will try it.

Thanks.

can anyone help me install the akismet plugin? I downloaded it yesterday but cannot figure out how/what to do with it now. Still getting up to 500 spmas a day and cannot moderate any comments