What does a ban hammer do?

The Banhammer refers to the figurative banning tool used by web administrators and forum moderators to prohibit undesirable members from accessing the site, which is typically done by blocking individual IP addresses.

The banhammer originates from MSN Chat (originally called Microsoft Chat), which was created in 1996. MSN Chat was a Microsoft Network version of the Internet Relay Chat (IRC). In these chatrooms, non-staff users could be given special functions in the channels to allow for certain types of moderation. The two positions that could be handed out were "owner" and "host", which were respectively marked by a golden hammer (shown below, left) or brown hammer (shown below, right) icon next to the user's name. Although the functions coming with the type of hammers may differ based on the client used, the functions given to the users with hammer icons commonly involved kicking and banning. For this reason the hammer icons were often given the nickname "banhammer".

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In 2003, Microsoft closed its unregulated chat rooms due to problems with spam and a constant danger of predators. On October 16th, 2006, MSN Chat shut down their servers, as MSN no longer deemed it profitable to run. The hammer icons can still be found back in other clients such as Sparkpea Chat, but most servers currently use symbols to show a person's status in a IRC chat room.

The earliest definition of the banhammer on Urban Dictionary originates from May 2003.. The definition marks the term as used by moderators on the SomethingAwful forums.

December 2007 marked the launch of Banhammer.com, which at one point provided a link titled "Revenge," which is now 404'd.

In the popular first-person shooter game Halo 3, there is a glitch that will enable a party host to pick up a gravity hammer that can kill several players at once from a distance.

In December 2009, the Banhammer.org forums were created, as a place where people could rage and troll without fear of banning.

The More You Know, the More You'll MMO PSA (March 2010) 74,000+ views.

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!

Default Error message
Admin screen
Ban Hammer Users

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I believe so.

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

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

If you want to block everyone from all subdomains (like ) then you can block .example.com and that will block all the subdomains.

May do what it says, but it only seems to work with registrations via the wordpress core registration process. If the registration is done via a plugin (I use UtlimateMember), it does not work.

As always, great job! And great service...we all needed this. THANK YOU SO MUCH

Great plugin. IT WORKS :)!

An excellent and functional plugin. As a suggestion, I would like to see an inverted list of allowed mail domains, I do not want users using third-party domains, and not known to anyone, to register on my site. Therefore, it would be easier to enter a "white" list than fill in a black one. Thanks for the work and great simple, but at the same time a functional plugin!

I was having exactly the same problem as described. Spammers with .ru extension. I tried blocking Russian users with Country Blocker to no avail. Ban Hammer instead is working fine.

Для чёрного списка email больше не нашёл нормальных плагинов. Тут всё просто, ничего лишнего

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