Ban Hammer Reviews, Downloads & Maintenance

We’ve all had this problem: a group of spammers from mail.ru are registering to your blog, but you want to keep registration open. How do you kill the spammers without bothering your clientele? While you could edit your theme’s functions.php and block the domain, once you get past a few bad eggs, you have to escalate.

Ban Hammer helps you do that by preventing unwanted users from registering.

On a single install of WordPress, instead of using its own database table, Ban Hammer pulls from your list of prohibited emails from the Disallowed Comment Keys feature, native to WordPress. Since emails never equal IP addresses, it simply skips over and ignores them.

On a network instance, there’s a network wide setting for banned emails and domains. This means you only have one place to update and maintain your blocked list. When a listed user attempts to register, they get a customizable message that they cannot register.

For advanced documentation, including how to use on WooCommerce, please visit the Ban Hammer Wiki.

Privacy Policy

This plugin does not track data outside of what WordPress already collects. It utilizes the submitted email address to validate the domain and compares it to the list of prohibited domains and emails. No additional data is processed.

Credits

Ban Hammer is a very weird fork of Philippe Paquet’s No Disposable Email plugin. The original plugin was a straight forward .dat file that listed all the bad emails (generally ones like mailinator that are disposable) and while Ban Hammer doesn’t do that, this would not have been possible without that which was done before.

Many thanks are due to WP-Deadbolt, for making me think about SQL and TTC for StopForumSpam integration. MASSIVE credit to Travis Hamera for the StopForumSpam/cURL fix! And then props to Helen Hou-Sandí for not using curl at all. Protip? Use WP_http instead!

Installation

Single Site (Traditional) Install

After installation, go to Tools > Ban Hammer to customize the error message (and banned emails, but it’s the same list from your comment moderation so…).

Multisite

After installation, go to Network Admin > Settings > Ban Hammer to customize the error message and banned email list. This will ban users network wide.

Frequently Asked Questions

If I change the Blocklist via Ban Hammer, will it change the Disallowed Comment Keys?

On single site installs, yes. They are the exact same list, they use the same fields and they update the same data. The only reason I put it there was I felt having an all-in-one place to get the data would be better.

Does this list the rejected registers?

No. Since WordPress itself doesn’t list rejected comments, the rejected users are similarly lost forever.

Where did Stop Forum Spam go?

This plugin no longer uses Stop Forum Spam. If you need that feature, please use Stop Spammer Registrations instead. They did it way better.

Does this work on MultiSite?

Yes it does, but a little differently. If you’re using multisite, instead of pulling from the Disallowed Comment Keys (which is per site), you have a separate list off Network Admin -> Settings. This is because you only want to have the network admins determining who can register on the network.

Does this work on BuddyPress?

I believe so.

Does this work on WooCommerce?

You have to make your own hook because WooCommerce doesn’t use the normal registration functions. Don’t panic. I have directions here.

Can I block partials?

Yes but not wildcards. If you put in viagra for example, you will block [email protected] and [email protected] so please use this carefully. If you put in cookie then you’ll block [email protected] and everyone would be sad.

If you want to block everyone from all subdomains (like [email protected]) then you can block .example.com and that will block all the subdomains. Though you probably want to also do example.com in that scenario.

Review feed

No reviews available

Screenshots

Default Error message
Admin screen
Ban Hammer Users

Changelog

3.1

November 2022 by Ipstenu
Fix issue with saving on PHP 8
Removed unnecessary options

3.0

March 2021 by Ipstenu
Remove support for WP 5.4 and older (blacklist_keys no longer supported)
Remove checks for if registration is active and filters for that

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