I really get sick of people who have nothing better to do than spam blog comments and set up bogus accounts making it look like you have a lot more subscribers than you do. I have been remiss in finding something that would allow me to block users by email extension (and of course there are some you don’t want to block like gmail and hotmail). Until yesterday. Here’s what happened.
I received a notification that I had a new subscriber to the blog Freelancing and More just before noontime. However, when I looked at the registration the name of the person used to login was “neurgeom”. Really? That wasn’t the worst part of it though, the email address was riley@beautywelldress.com. So as I’m prone to doing when someone subcribes, I went to the website. But the website doesn’t exist. It got better. Between noon and 2:30 I had 9 registrations from the same user name, the same domain but all different email names. That was the end of that. I deleted them all and emailed them all but as expected, I got no response (I was shocked: NOT).
So I started going through WordPress plugins and lo and behold I found “Ban Hammer“. I went ahead and added it and lo and behold “neurgeom” hasn’t opened a new account. You can stop folks by the @email they are using before they get a chance to subscribe. Now of course it’s not going to stop the yo-yos who are using Gmail or other accounts like that (though you can put the entire name, such as spammer@gmail.com) since it’s unlikely you’ll want to completely ban Gmail users but you get the idea. This should stop them for the time being.
I recommend this as I went in one day from averaging 20 plus spam comments and 4 plus spam registrations in 24 hours to only one of each! Yes!
About Doreen Martel
Well-rounded freelance writer who contributes to various blogs, paid to write sites and revenue sharing sites. Doreen is legally blind and has worked at home for more than 10 years. She uses the lessons learned from this experience to enhance her writing and share information with others.
