Is there a spam comment blocker that blocks IP addresses for a limited amount of time? [closed]

Question

I'm getting a lot of spam on my Wordpress blog. I'd like to cut down on the amount of comments I have to moderate. I'm looking for a plugin that does something like this: automatically marks comments as spam, and allows me to say "yes, this is spam". Once I've marked the comment as spam, block the user's IP address for X number of days. Is there a plugin out there that will do that, rather than me going through and blocking IP addresses manually?

Answer 1

Do you have access to your webserver? I use a program called "fail2ban". This program scans log files to see if certain things have been logged - such as people trying to access your email - and bans the IP address for a set amount of time. You can vary it from 1 second to a thousand years :-)

Now, I wrote a bit of code that creates a log of every time WordPress marks something as spam, and I wrote a filter for fail2ban to read those log files.

Akismet is brilliant at marking things as spam, but you can still end up with tons of spam to check in case it's wrongly marked. You would need to use Akismet with this method - that takes care of finding and marking spam.

If you want me to give further details, let me know and I'll try and walk you through the process. I can give you code for fail2ban which only monitors spam so it's simpler (fail2ban is a great piece of freeware which can monitor every part of your server).

I run a very busy blog which used to get 70-100 spam mails a day, and since I brought in the ban system - which bans IP addresses for a week (just in case it was a spoofed IP address) - my spam has gone down to about 5-6 a day. It's definitely been worth doing for me.

Answer 2

I use WordPress IP Blocker Pro which accomplishes all my worries. It has features like Auto-IP Blocking and Country Blocking as well.

Answer 3

The plugin WP-Ban has a variety of options for blocking IP addresses, BUT unfortunately I couldn't find anything that auto blocks an IP based on their comment being marked as spam.

Spam Free Wordpress claims to block all automated spam automatically. I have never used it, so I can't vouch for it. It has good ratings (insert grain of salt here) on Wordpress.org so maybe give it a try.

Also, consider looking at your web hosts options. An 'IP Deny Manager' can be found in cpanel etc, but this also won't block automatically based off comments.

As for blocking IP addresses for a limited amount of time, I couldn't find any plugins in my search that had that functionality.

Answer 4

Have you tried akismet? I've found it to be very good at filtering out spam. You have to grab an API key, which you can get here. They are free for personal use.

Akismet lets you see how many approved comments users have, and other such niceties. I'm not sure if you can block IP addresses for a limited amount of time. My hunch is that you can't. My question would be: why do you want to block for just a limited amount of time?

If you're just looking for an awesome spam filter, I'd roll with akismet and call it a day.

Answer 5

This is a problem we have as well! We have found The Bad behavior plug-in works rather. well.

Answer 6

Here's what I ended up doing. Since I received thousands of spam comments a week, I began to mark the spam comments as spam. Then, I installed WP-Ban, a simple little plugin that allows you to block IP addresses. Then, I used a simple MYSQL code block to show me all the duplicate IP addresses that were marked as spam:

SELECT `comment_author_IP`
FROM `wp_comments`
WHERE `comment_approved` = 'spam'
GROUP by `comment_author_IP`
HAVING count(*)>1

This has worked really well for me and has drastically cut down on the amount of spam I receive.