Jeff Starr

<blockquote>
Banhammer: Protect your site against enemy hordes!
</blockquote>
Banhammer gives you full control over who and what may access your site. Visit the Armory to monitor traffic and review suspicious visitors. If you find some user or bot that is causing problems, you can ban them with a click. Or, if you just want to keep an eye on someone, you can flag them with a warning. Any banned users will be denied access to your site, until you restore access via the Tower. Check out the video and screenshots to get a better idea of how it works.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Banhammer - Intro" width="750" height="422" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0t4qBH0TuW0?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<blockquote>
Important: Not yet compatible with WP Multisite!
</blockquote>
Core Features
<ul>
<li>Ban or Warn any WP user or IP address</li>
<li>Restore access to any banned targets</li>
<li>Monitor site traffic in the Armory</li>
<li>Monitor logged users in the Admin Area</li>
<li>Monitor all visitors on the front-end</li>
<li>Manage banned targets in the Tower</li>
<li>Complete Ajax-powered navigation</li>
<li>Useful tools like jump, sort, search</li>
<li>Complete documentation via Help tab</li>
<li>Automatically clear logged data</li>
<li>Sound effects for Ban, Warn, et al</li>
<li>NEW: manually block any IP address</li>
</ul>
Options Galore
<ul>
<li>Optionally ignore logged-in users</li>
<li>Optionally protect Login Page and Admin Area</li>
<li>Customize the banned response and status code</li>
<li>Display banned message or redirect the request</li>
<li>Choose the interval to clear logged data</li>
<li>One-click restore plugin default options</li>
<li>All collected data may be deleted easily</li>
</ul>
More Features
<ul>
<li>Easy to use</li>
<li>Clean code</li>
<li>Fast and secure</li>
<li>Built with WP API</li>
<li>Lightweight and flexible</li>
<li>Regularly updated and “future proof”</li>
<li>Works great with any WordPress theme</li>
<li>Comprehensive search of all logged data</li>
<li>Works great with other WordPress plugins</li>
<li>Works with or without Gutenberg Block Editor</li>
<li>Focused on usability, performance, and security</li>
</ul>
Banhammer is perfect for site owners, admins, and developers who want to keep an eye on traffic and block any unwanted visitors. It is a simple, flexible, and powerful security solution. Perfect for the best WordPress sites.
Exclusive Features in the Pro Version
<ul>
<li>Ban based on URI request, referrer, or user agent</li>
<li>Whitelist any IP address or user agent</li>
<li>View cookies, POST data, and FILES data</li>
<li>Email Alerts for banned & warned requests</li>
<li>Display custom message to each banned target</li>
<li>Add private notes to warned/banned targets</li>
<li>Customize target strings for user agents, IPs, etc.</li>
<li>Disable logging of banned, warned, and whitelisted targets</li>
<li>Smart bot detection</li>
<li>Paged results in Tower</li>
<li>User avatars in Tower</li>
</ul>
For complete documentation, visit the Help tab on any Banhammer screen.
+ <a href="https://plugin-planet.com/banhammer-pro/" rel="nofollow ugc">Banhammer Pro now available »</a>
Privacy
User Data: Banhammer collects user data to “do its thing”. The collected data is temporary and automatically deleted every day, or at whatever time interval is specified in the plugin settings. The only time that any data is “remembered” is when you ban something. For each person/thing that you ban, the plugin stores either the IP address OR the username (never both). At any time, all saved data may be deleted permanently via the plugin settings and Armory Tools.
Cookies: Banhammer does not set any cookies for regular visitors, but does set a few simple cookies for admin-level users. These simple cookies enable dope effects and interactivity in the Armory and Tower UI. But no cookies are set or used for any other visitor/user or purpose.
Services: Banhammer uses a free lookup service for GeoIP information. This happens only for admin-level users when they are viewing data in the Armory or Tower. No other third-party services are used by this plugin.
Banhammer is developed and maintained by <a href="https://x.com/perishable" rel="nofollow ugc">Jeff Starr</a>, 15-year <a href="https://plugin-planet.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">WordPress developer</a> and <a href="https://books.perishablepress.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">book author</a>.
Support development
I develop and maintain this free plugin with love for the WordPress community. To show support, you can <a href="https://monzillamedia.com/donate.html" rel="nofollow ugc">make a donation</a> or purchase one of my books:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://wp-tao.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">The Tao of WordPress</a></li>
<li><a href="https://digwp.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Digging into WordPress</a></li>
<li><a href="https://htaccessbook.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">.htaccess made easy</a></li>
<li><a href="https://wp-tao.com/wordpress-themes-book/" rel="nofollow ugc">WordPress Themes In Depth</a></li>
<li><a href="https://books.perishablepress.com/downloads/wizards-collection-sql-recipes-wordpress/" rel="nofollow ugc">Wizard’s SQL Recipes for WordPress</a></li>
</ul>
And/or purchase one of my premium WordPress plugins:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://plugin-planet.com/bbq-pro/" rel="nofollow ugc">BBQ Pro</a> – Blazing fast WordPress firewall</li>
<li><a href="https://plugin-planet.com/blackhole-pro/" rel="nofollow ugc">Blackhole Pro</a> – Automatically block bad bots</li>
<li><a href="https://plugin-planet.com/banhammer-pro/" rel="nofollow ugc">Banhammer Pro</a> – Monitor traffic and ban the bad guys</li>
<li><a href="https://plugin-planet.com/ga-google-analytics-pro/" rel="nofollow ugc">GA Google Analytics Pro</a> – Connect WordPress to Google Analytics</li>
<li><a href="https://plugin-planet.com/head-meta-pro/" rel="nofollow ugc">Head Meta Pro</a> – Ultimate Meta Tags for WordPress</li>
<li><a href="https://plugin-planet.com/simple-ajax-chat-pro/" rel="nofollow ugc">Simple Ajax Chat Pro</a> – Unlimited chat rooms</li>
<li><a href="https://plugin-planet.com/usp-pro/" rel="nofollow ugc">USP Pro</a> – Unlimited front-end forms</li>
</ul>
Links, tweets and likes also appreciated. Thank you! 🙂

Banhammer – Monitor Site Traffic, Block Bad Users and Bots

Because the info on this plugin says nothing about it, I feel obligated to do so: 
It does NOT work on MultiSite, unfortunately :-( 

It looked very promising, the author announcing it on his own website with the words "waaay too much fun". And I can imagine it is indeed, but not if you are running a multisite installation and find out your site has had no protection whatsoever, since installing this plugin. 

So, in this case: no, it's not waaaay too much fun, unfortunately...

Does not work on MultiSite!

Monitor traffic and ban unwanted visitors. Block any user or IP address so they can't access your site.

Pascal

iQ Block Country is a plugin that allows you to limit access to your website content. You can either allow or disallow visitors from defined countries to (parts of) your content.
For instance if you have content that should be restricted to a limited set of countries you can do so. 
If you want to block rogue countries that cause issues like for instance hack attempts, spamming of your comments etc you can block them as well.
Do you want secure your WordPress Admin backend site to only your country? Entirely possible! You can even block all countries and only allow your ip address.
And even if you block a country you can still allow certain visitors by putting their ip address on the allow list just like you can allow a country but put ip addresses on the block list from that country.
You can show blocked visitors a message which you can style by using CSS or you can redirect them to a page within your WordPress site. Or you can redirect the visitors to an external website.
You can (dis)allow visitors to blog articles, blog categories or pages or all content.
Stop visitors from doing harmful things on your WordPress site or limit the countries that can access your blog. Add an additional layer of security to your WordPress site.
This plugin uses the GeoLite database from Maxmind. It has a 99.5% accuracy so that is pretty good for a free database. If you need higher accuracy you can buy a license from MaxMind directly. 
If you cannot or do not want to download the GeoIP database from Maxmind you can use the GeoIP API website available on https://webence.net/ 
If you want to use the GeoLite database from Maxmind you will have to download the GeoIP database from MaxMind directly and upload it to your site. 
The WordPress license does not allow this plugin to download the MaxMind Geo database for you.
Please be aware that although this plugin can help you greatly with reducing the number of ‘bad’ visitors on your website it is not fool proof and those who really want to visit your site may find a away. 
This is not a security issue but a simple fact of today. Nobody can guarantee you 100% security as it is a constant battle between the good guys and the bad guys.
If you are sure your webhosting or yourself does not use any form of caching or proxying we recommend setting the “Override IP information” on the Home tab to REMOTE_ADDR
Do you need help with this plugin? Please email support@webence.net.
<h4>GDPR Information</h4>
This plugin stores data about your visitors in your local WordPress database. The number of days this data is stores can be configured on the settings page. You can also disable logging any data.
Data which is stored of blocked visitors:
<ul>
<li>IP Address</li>
<li>Date and time of the visit</li>
<li>URL that was requested</li>
<li>Country of the IP address</li>
<li>If the block happened on your backend or your frontend</li>
</ul>
Data which is stored on non blocked visitors:
<ul>
<li>Nothing</li>
</ul>
If you allow tracking (yeah if you do!) you share some information with us. This is only the IP address of a blocked request on your backend. No other information is send and only the IP address is logged on our systems to gather how many times that IP address have attempted to login to a backend. We do not log which site was visited or which URL just only the IP address So we cannot lead an ip address back to a specific website or user. If an IP address is not blocked again within a month we will remove the IP address from the list.
If you use the GeoIP API service you send the IP address of your visitor to one of our servers. This IP Address is however in no way stored at our servers and only used to convert it to a country id.
<h4>Using this plugin with a caching plugin</h4>
Please note that many of the caching plugins are not compatible with this plugin. The nature of caching is that a dynamically build web page is cached into a static page. 
 If a visitor is blocked this plugin sends header data where it supplies info that the page should not be cached. Many plugins however disregard this info and cache the page or the redirect. Resulting in valid visitors receiving a message that they are blocked. This is not a malfunction of this plugin.
Disclaimer: No guarantees are made but after some light testing the following caching plugins seem to work: Comet Cache, WP Super Cache 
Plugins that do NOT work: W3 Total Cache, Hyper cache, WPRocket
Warning: Caching & Geo Blocking do not work well together.
In the best case scenario countries or IP’s you want to block get served a page from cache and when visiting non cached pages they get blocked. This is due to the fact when pages are served from cache the iQ Block Country plugin does not get started and can’t do it’s job.
If the caching plugin however ignores the caching headers you risk the chance that the block message gets cached and everyone gets to see they are blocked even the countries that you did not block.
If you’re fine with blocked countries getting served the page from cache then you’re fine using the iQ Block Country plugin.
If you’re not you should disable either the cache or the Geo Blocking. Or search for another solution outside WordPress (for instance by using the Varnish software) where you can GeoBlock at a caching level.
<h3>GeoIP API</h3>
For your convenience we offer a GeoIP API service. This API is not mandatory to use as you can always use the free MaxMind GeoIP Database.
If you do not want or can’t go through the hassle of updating your MaxMind GeoIP database we provide an API service to convert the IP address of your visitors to a country.
If you decide to purchase an GeoIP API Key via https://webence.net you’ll get an eMail with your API Key (License Key). 
Once you enter this key in your iQ Block Country settings your license key will be validated at our API service and a the nearest API server to you will be chosen. To do this your website will contact all API servers once to request 
an empty file.
Once you use the API service the IP address of your visitors and your API key are send to one of the API servers and converted to a country. The plugin checks if the visitor should be blocked based on that country or not.
What is logged on our end? 
* Upon validation of your license key your request will be logged in our webserver logs. (This will be the IP address of your webserver). 
* Upon checking an IP address of your visitor this IP address is only used to convert it to the country it belongs to and is not logged. We have no way to link a visitors IP address to your website. 
 What is logged is your API Key and the Website URL making the request.
If you decide to purchase the GeoIP API key your chosen payment account will be charged by on a time basis. This subscription will not renew itself unless you subscribed to our service prior to September 2024.
Privacy policy regarding this service specific can be found here: https://webence.nl/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Privacy-Policy-Webence-API.pdf
<h3>MaxMind Database Usage</h3>
This plugin uses the Free version of the MaxMind GeoIP2 Country Database. You can also use the paid version but will have to make sure it is uploaded to the same location with the filename of Free database.
MaxMind Terms of Use: https://www.maxmind.com/en/terms-of-use 
MaxMind Privacy Policy: https://www.maxmind.com/en/privacy-policy

iQ Block Country


I've used this on more than a dozen sites over the years, and the functionality has been fantastic. I do wish there was an easier way to keep the IPs current without FTP, but I'm a fan. Keep up the good work!


Multiple Sites - No Issues For Years

Allow or disallow visitors from certain countries accessing (parts of) your website

Banhammer – Monitor Site Traffic, Block Bad Users and Bots vs iQ Block Country