One comment per user

well, it could certainly be hacked into a plugin, but you’d need a way to store how many times an email address has been used to comment, in the db.

Unfortunately, nothing would prevent these people from just using another (fake) email address to identify themselves. Then of course you start looking to block them by IP address, but dynamic IPs screw you there, and so forth.

The short answer is no, the long answer is yes, but with a maybe.

Can I ask… why get them to sign up? If you’re looking at this as a possible spam throttle, then maybe check out your comments more closely, they don’t tend to use the same names/emails/ips very often. You might cut your spam down by 10% but even that’s probably optimistic.

thanks ivovic, that’s pretty much was i was thinking, just didn’t know if someone had already created a plug-in that checked IP addresses.

i was thinking that i should be able to input a few lines into the wp-comments-post.php file that would compare the current users IP address to all of the ones that are currently within my wordpress database, but being relatively new to php not sure how to accomplish this…

by the way, those are some rather excellent photos on your site… i just got a 30D myself and can’t stop buying lenses, its friggin’ addicting.

Cheers for the kind words Mark, it is very addictive ?? If you’re looking for a good photoblogging plugin, I’d thoroughly suggest YaPB

Anyway I’m not aware of any plugins that do this for you, but I’m still struggling to work out how it would be useful.

IPs change all the time, so it wouldn’t be particularly effective, even against “good” folks.

As for a simple comparison, I don’t think there’s an easy way to associate the current comment with all the comments ever made in order to compare IPs, so if you wanted to do this, you’d have to query all the comments on your site and loop through them checking the IP address.

In order to be effective, you could only do this once a comment has been submitted – which isn’t handled by your template, so you’d have to hack the core code… thereby making future upgrades difficult.

I think it’s altogether too much work/effort/added processing given that you’re not likely to get a match very often, even on the same user.

I’m happy to keep helping you bump this thread though, until someone gets sick of us and writes the plugin to shut us up. ??

YaPB… amazing. Doesn’t surprise me that this is out there, but thanks for the advice, I’ll definitely use this when I redesign my site soon (last design is almost 2 years old).

And yea, I pretty much figured it’d have to be a query that looped through the IP addresses in my database and all that jazz, just seems like too much work for something that I could just as easily check in the dashboard’s comments section.

Anyway, the site is live now if you want to check it out: https://www.diggnationintexas.com

Thanks for your help!

ohh cool idea – and I see why you wanted it now… if only it were actually effective, it might have been worth coding.