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How to permanently block someone from your blog?

Someone asked me this question the other day — how do I ban a troublesome visitor permanently? The answer to this isn’t simple and requires some social engeneering of sorts which will also be dependent on how smart that visitor is.

Here are some fairly simple steps to ban someone from your blog. These steps assume that you control your hosting account and runs WordPress as your blogging tool.

  • Require registration before commenting. This *might* hinder your visitor from commenting if he needs to sign up first and validates his email address with that. However, the troublesome visitor can always sign up for a new email address for the sole purpose of registering on your blog.
  • If they were able to bypass step #1, you can change their password in the WP Admin. However, the visitor can always use the Forgot Password facility to retrieve it. A better trick would be to change his username instead so even if he’ll use the forgot password feature, he’ll have to do some pretty darn guesswork what his new username is. To get around it, the visitor will have to get a new email account and re-register on your blog.
  • Together with steps #1 and #2, you can set all comments to stay in moderation first (see WP Options) so you’ll have to manually approve each comment before they show up and thus filtering out your visitor’s undesirable comments.
  • IP ban him. In your hosting control panel (e.g. cPanel), there’s a feature there call IP Ban list. Identify your visitor’s IP address via one of his older comments and add it to the IP Ban List. If you’re lucky enough, your visitor might have a static IP address so he can’t visit your blog/site and leave a comment. The problem here is if the visitor is on a dynamic IP and he gets a fresh new one every he logs online. You can ban an entire IP range of his ISP but that would include other innocent potential readers as well.

A combination of any or all of the steps above might discourage your visitor to keep coming back and post a comment. Another idea I had was to sniff out the visitor’s browser version, OS and screen size and create an htaccess rule to redirect anyone with that combo elsewhere. The most effective method really is to totally disable commenting in your blog. :D

You guys have any other tricks in mind? I’m sending this link to the person who asked for advise so she can read your additional comments as well.

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Avatar for Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

10 Responses

  1. Avatar for mass communication mass communication says:

    Do you mind if I quote a few of your posts as
    long as I provide credit and sources back to your
    blog? My blog site is in the very same area of interest as yours and my visitors would really benefit from some of the information you present here.

    Please let me know if this okay with you. Thanks!

  2. Avatar for Владимир Кужляев Владимир Кужляев says:

    Даа… Читаю и понимаю, что ничего не понимаю о чем речь:)

  3. Avatar for Abe Olandres Abe Olandres says:

    @ Manuel

    No, I don’t block GWA. I just do IP ban esp. for spam referrers and comments.

    @ Everyone

    Thanks to all for your tips!

  4. Avatar for Alfie Alfie says:

    In blog script that I was using before, I modify the script such that no commenter can submit a comment with a URL, (starting with “http://” or “http://www”), then they pissed-off and stop doing it again.

  5. Avatar for ManuelV ManuelV says:

    @jhay: GWA prefetches your web pages so that the user enjoys a faster browsing experience. It’s as if the robot clicks on all the links, so that when the user does click on a link of your page, a cached copy is served. This prefetching has an impact on your bandwidth.

    Sometimes, a served cached copy involves pages requiring log in authentication, so some users end up seeing pages logged into by other users. This, in effect, raises some privacy issues.

  6. Avatar for SELaplana SELaplana says:

    moderating the comment is the best step.

    you don’t need to ban a person in coming back to your blog. you must be thankful for someone has visited your blog.

    just let him drop his comment into your blog, anyway you can edit their comments.

    hayaan mong magspam comment ang mga visitors mo as long as their comments are related to your posts. In that way, madagdagan ang content ng post mo …. at the same time wala kang ika-worry sa link to his hompage dahil automatic naman yun na “NO FOLLOW” para sa search engines.

  7. Avatar for jhay jhay says:

    Just enable comment moderation and if the troublemaker appears again just delete his comment. then ingore him, don’t post anything addressed to him or her it just flatters them much more.

    @ManuelV: Why ban users using Google Web Accelerator? Are there issues with it?

    Anyone?

  8. Avatar for ManuelV ManuelV says:

    Hi Abe… Do you block Yugatech.com visitors if they’re using Google Web Accelerator?

  9. Avatar for ade ade says:

    I’ve had a visitor who used to post a lot of crap against muslims on my tagboard. It became so bad that I had to delete my tagboard later on. For wordpress though, I just required first-time posters to be approved, and it has worked like a charm for me.

  10. Avatar for Rickey Rickey says:

    Normally, users are troublesome because they post all kind of crap in the comments section.

    For WordPress, I’ve turned on user registration and in the Discussion Options, I’ve included the offending user’s e-mail address in Comment Moderation.

    If you are using Spam Karma, you have to turn comment moderation back on using this plug-in:

    http://wordpress.org/support/topic/38460

    Hope this helps!

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