Though I have had pointed disagreements with several persons on this blog, I have only banned one person from commenting and participating. If you’re Unitarian Universalist and blog long enough, you’ll know I mean. Reasoning with him won’t work. Appealing to his freedom doesn’t work with me, since there are limits even to the freedom of speech and this is my blog and am responsible for it and to the parties this person defames.
Because this individual leaves so much demented wrath in his path — and is so persistent is getting comments on one’s blog — I thought I’d point out a technical fix in WordPress.
After you login, first view Comments and search by email address for the person in question; there may be some old comments that need to be removed. Then go to Options then choose Discussion. At the bottom of the page, there is a subsection called Comment blacklist. In its text box, create a new line and add the person’s email address. Update that page and you’re done. (You can ban by name or IP, but these affect others and don’t seem fair. An exception to the IP rule is if a stalker, say, rapidly creates a number of identities — called “sock puppets” — and floods your blog. I’d think it would be fair to ban the IP and then contact the provider to have them deal with the individual.)
Of course, said person has adopted a variety of false email addresses to try to get around my attempts to blacklist his email address.
Is that the same as marking them as spam?
Yes, but this might not be obvious to the afflicted novice.
Another idea is to mark certain keywords that are unique to a certain individual, so that they get held for approval. Obviously you want to choose carefully so others don’t get held, but since I pretty much moderate all new comments, no one would notice.
And there are certain phrases that are commonly used by said individual.
One thing I’ve noticed. If you approve a comment from someone, but then mark another one from them as spam, WordPress will hold all their other comments for you to approve or disapprove.