How to block WordPress spam comments by IP address

Generally the Akismet spam filter plugin does a very good job of dealing with comment spam, but over the past few days six comments got through and are waiting for me to take action (click on the image above to see them).

When I received the first (very ambiguous) comment from someone called Jack, I was a bit suspicious as the email address was a competitive keyword phrase with four 9s attached to the end. But, because there was no URL submitted (and no link) I gave the commenter the benefit of the doubt.

At that time I didn’t approve or delete the comment, I left it in moderation.

Since then I have had another five comments, all of which hint at the topic of the post being commented on and all of which have similarly dodgy looking email addresses (which are also being used as the name).

This situation is a bit of a funny one – if the person submitting these comments is genuine why keep changing the email address? And if the person making the comments is looking for links, he or she has a lot to learn.

Whatever is going on here there is only one thing left for me to do – and that is ban the IP address so these comments stop coming through.

How to block WordPress spam comments by IP address

Locate the IP address you want to ban – the IP address is the set of numbers in this image.

Navigate to the Settings menu and choose Discussion from the sub menu

On the Discussion page there are two large text areas, choose the second – Comment Blacklist and enter the IP address you want to block. You can add one IP address per line if you have multiple spammers you want to ban.