If a logged-in user is both a comment moderator and an admin, it would be nice if you could tick a box to ban the poster of a comment (or their IP if not signed in. Or their IP, AND their login if signed in, I suppose.) via the comment moderation interface. Presently, you must view the back-end files to establish who posted the comment (the IP is not exposed in the moderation interface yet.) — Jon, 2012-06-27

+1, FWIW. in my experience, banning a bunch of IPs did help with the spambots for some time. In anti-spam protection i implemented some measures to implement this banning "out of band" but i have mostly given up on that now. all comments are moderated a priori and i just get a nightly email warning me when new spam comes in. the advantage of that approach is the spam never reaches the production site (1) and (2) i can ignore spammers until real content comes in at which point i can just flush it all out. -- anarcat

Thanks. I moderate all my comments and send myself a nightly email, but I was sending the list of all unmoderated comments in each mail, rather than just new ones. If I switch to just the new ones, as you have, I could indeed just ignore the mails that are clearly all spam. Thanks for the tip! — Jon, 2021-12-06

I don't actually think my script is that smart: it keeps sending me mail for all unmoderated comments, every night. I just ignore those mails for a while until they have valid content. -- anarcat, 2021-12-06

Haha well, you've inadvertently improved my process anyway I just added -mtime -2 to a find. Ultimately I wonder if I'll move to reviewing and publishing comments by filing mail, and/or applying my (remarkably good, crm114) mail filters to blog comments. — Jon, 2021-12-07