One of my blogs has been consistently receiving spam messages selling craps like viagra and other products from one pathetic guy thinking he can do whatever he wants to do with others’ blogs. Actually I don’t mind receiving one or two spams from different people but this smart guy showed his persistence by sending me tens of different messages everyday using the same IP and e-mail addresses. All of his rubbish posts got caught by my Akismet plugin but still I had to clean up the mess he left. I can easily delete those spams at one click but sometimes Akismet caught real posts as well so I don’t really want to hit that delete-all-spam button.
Having sick of those spam posts I decided to install a spam blacklist plugin on my blog. I found two plugins that will allow me to get rid of them forever:

WP-Ban 1.50 Plugin

WP-Ban 1.50 plugin will ban the IP addresses of the spammers based on the IP addresses you input to that plugin. Note that this is powerful plugin you can even blacklist spammers by IP, IP Range, host name and referer url from visiting your WordPress’s blog. It will display a custom ban message when the banned IP, IP range, host name or referer url tries to visit you blog. You can also exclude certain IPs from being banned. There will be statistics recordered on how many times they attemp to visit your blog. It allows wildcard matching too.

A special warning is addressed by the plugin’s developer: Do NOT block your own IP address! I also think it’s not right to use wild cards to block a large number of IPs or domains carelessly or you could end up blocking thousands of your own readers and search engine bots. Only if particular IPs occur too frequently in your spam comments – like my case above – ban those IPs and see your spam reduce in minutes.

There are some pros and cons about using this plugin in your blog. The cons are mainly based on the facts that spammers don’t use IPs belong to them and you are wasting your time as they switch IPs and play a lot of games automatically while you have to do it manually. I however decided to give it a try because it will display a custom ban message when the spammers try to visit my blog, such a great pleasure to let them know that I’m the one in charge and they are not welcome to my blog.

KB Spam Blacklist

The other great plugin is KB Spam Blacklist. This is a regular-expression based spam blacklist plugin. And by blacklist, I mean blacklist. If a comment matches one of your regexes, it gets deleted immediately, not sent to moderation. In short, this plugin takes some of the load off of Akismet by looking for really obvious stuff. It’s easy to use. Just activate the plugin–that’s all. It comes with four regular expressions. You can add to, modify, or remove these if you want. I plan to install the KB spam blacklist plugin in this blog.

There is another way to block IPs address., you can do it from your .htaccess file but I guess plugins will help people who don’t know how to deal with the html code.

Some people rely on captchas but I personally don’t really like writing comments on blogs with captchas and I believe I’m not alone. That’s why you don’t find it installed here, I will just let Akismet and the spam blacklist plugins do their job. Akismet alone is a great plugin and in my opinion all WordPress blogger should have it activated unless they don’t mind receiving spams.

Rudi

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