The FinderPress tool directory
WordPress plugin
Block Top Spammers
Block Top Spammers displays a list of your top spammers’ IP addresses, based on all comments in your database that are marked as spam. It also generates a blacklist for your .htaccess file to block those spammers from your website entirely, thus taking load off the server. – You will need another pl
PricingFree downloadThe WordPress.org download is free. Pro versions, add-ons or external services may cost extra.
CompatibilityRequires WordPress 2.8.
SourceWordPress plugins · Oct 19, 2026
01 / Source details
About this tool.
Block Top Spammers displays a list of your top spammers’ IP addresses, based on all comments in your database that are marked as spam. It also generates a blacklist for your .htaccess file to block those spammers from your website entirely, thus taking load off the server. – You will need another plugin (like Akismet ) to identify the spam.
PHP 5 and Apache required.
Roadmap
0.6 (April 2010)
- edit blacklist (i.e. remove individual addresses, manually add addresses and/or subnets)
- manually override .htaccess location
- customize 403 error shown to blocked spammers
1.0 (May 2010)
- Multi-Site support (WordPress 3.0, maybe WPMU 2.8/2.9)
See it in action
A closer look.
02 / Source details
Getting started.
- 01Upload the entire top-spammers directory to the /wp-content/plugins directory
- 02Activate Block Top Spammers through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
- 03Make sure you have another plugin installed and activated to identify the spam (if you don’t, take a look at Akismet )
03 / Source details
Frequently asked questions.
Why do I have to edit .htaccess manually?
There’s two reasons for this:
- 01Allowing WordPress to write to .htaccess as it does when you change the permalink structure would break many of my WordPress installations. Since I wrote this plugin first and foremost for my own use I would have never benefitted from this functionality.
- 02I actually had the plugin update .htaccess automatically. But then I blocked myself from my test site… Blocking an IP address through .htaccess is quite a harsh measure. It doesn’t only prevent bots at that IP from posting comments, it prevents users who happen to use that same IP from accessing the blog. – I intend to automatically write to .htaccess in a future release, with a few security mechanisms added…
Keep exploring
