Mark comments as spam in WordPress automatically by IP address

The comment spammers are getting smarter. It used to be that my Askimet spam plugin for WordPress would catch just about everything, but lately I have noticed some are getting through. They are sneaky and the comments read something like this:

“Really cool blog. I found it on yahoo. I am looking forward to read more posts.”

And of course they have a URL and it is obviously spam because the same IP address will leave a similar comment on other posts but with a different name and email address associated with it.

There are a couple of things you can do in this case including installing a plugin to completely ban IP addresses from accessing your site to begin with. But there is a way in WordPress and without a plugin to automatically spam comments from specific IP addressses.

So if you receive these sneaky, shady comments and are tired of manually marking them as spam, all you need to do is follow the easy steps below in your WordPress dashboard:

1. Click on “comments” on the left and locate the offending comment (or if you receive email notifications of all comments, you can click on the Whois link).
2. Copy the IP address located just below the Author’s email address to your clip board (if you clicked on the Whois link, the IP will be at the top of the page and it actually was in the link itself but it is harder to copy it from there).
3. Click on “settings” on the left, and then “discussion.”
4. Scroll down to the box called “Comment Blacklist” and paste the IP address into the box. You can also enter a word, name or URL (one per line) and it will automatically mark as spam, any comment containing them.

That’s it. A simple easy way to help keep spammers from wasting your time and taking advantage of you.

Tweet