How to blacklist spammers on your WordPress blog

Recently we had a spam bot bombard one of the blogs here on BlogPro and so we had to blacklist the IP addresses from where this bot originated. Blacklisting IPs, or anything for that matter such as specific words, phrases, email addresses, etc., is quite simple to do and this video tutorial walks you through doing that.

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The blacklist area is located in the Discussions section under your Settings menu. When you go there notice that by default we have a setting marked that requires a commenter have an approved comment before his or her first comment appears on your blog. This setting not only helps prevent spam from appearing on your blog, but also gives you the opportunity to ensure some level of trust with actual people visiting and commenting on your blog. It is recommended you keep this setting in place.

Once you are in the Settings > Discussions area you can insert any criteria such as email addresses, words or phrases, and of course IP addresses into the Blacklist box to prohibit content matching your criteria from appearing as comments on your blog.

After doing this, remember to save your settings and then also mark the comments as spam which you can do in the Comments area of the admin.

If you have any questions about this or want to dive deeper into this topic feel free to contact us or to leave your comments below.