What do you do when you know it’s the same person that’s been spamming your blog over and over again? What do you do when you know that someone is committing click fraud from a particular computer in hopes of getting you banned from Adsense? Speaking for myself, I have adjusted my .htaccess file to ban referrals from certain domains, but what about when it’s a single person?

That’s when I found the WP-Ban WordPress plug-in by Lester Chan. Currently in version 1.20, WP-Ban allows you to ban users based on four different factors: IP, IP range, host name, or referrer URL. Sometimes, it’s difficult to know who you need to ban, but if you’ve been receiving a large amount of spam comments from a particular IP, WP-Ban is a good plug-in to prevent their entry from your blog in the first place. No entry, no spam.

When they plunk your blog’s URI into their address bar, instead of seeing your blog, they will see a page that simply reads, “You are banned.” This message can be customized to say whatever you want. The plug-in also allows for wild cards and it has a stat-tracking feature so you’ll know how many times that particular IP attempted to visit your blog. There are shortcomings, of course, because persistent spammers can still get to you via a proxy. That said, I feel that WP-Ban is a good first line of defense.

In addition to Akismet, what else do you use to prevent spam comments on your blog?