[design219]

I have a good friend, a professional artist, who has a stalker. This woman lives a couple hundred miles away, but she has shown up at a couple of his openings and created scenes, being arrested once.

From the stat counter on his website, we know she goes through his site every single day at work and at home. She sends him bizarre and lurid emails, which he has deleted without response for over a year now.

Anyway, he recently started a blog, and now she's started harassment in the comments. He switched to moderated comments, but that requires constant monitoring, and it actually made her happy that he now HAD to read what she was saying. So he has restricted comments to just invited viewers, but that restricts participation, and is not a satisfactory solution.

His blog is on Blogger, and we can't find any way to restrict specific users. Anyone have an idea?

[besson3c]

How about adding her email address to a blocklist?

[zombie punk]

Or her ips since it seems that you have them? There is really not much that can be done legally about people posting comments that are not threatening in some serious sense on a public blog, but if she is actually showing up and being violent or threatening then he could explore getting a restraining order to prevent her turning up to events in person. It may be possible to extend that to contacting him by any means.

[design219]

Yes, but the problem is Blogger doesn't have a way to restrict individual ISPs, or username/emails.

[Cold Warrior]

File for a restraining order. Given past real-world issues (documented by the police arrests) and electronic-trail harassment, it should be a simple matter. It should also apply to electronic communications as well.

[residentEvil]

you can do this yourself. cause with blogger, you can edit the template and put in your own code.

when a user visits a website, many things are available to the programmer. simply put in a redirect based on the ip of the stalker's ISP.

here is the php:

<?
$visitor = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
if (preg_match("/192.168.0.1/",$visitor)) {
header('Location: http://www.yoursite.com/thank-you.html');
} else {
header('Location: http://www.yoursite.com/home-page.html');
};
?>

obviously, you have to modify the ip above.

[design219]

Wow, sweet!

Thanks residentEvil, we will give it a go. My friend is not a computer guy, and I've up till now never dealt with these kind of template sites, but I'm sure I can figure this out. I'll report back how it works.

[residentEvil]

it should work. i can't edit my blog from work right now or i'd try it. the back end is blogger, even though it is my own domain.

to test, i would simply set up a dummy page at domainname.com/play/index.html and try it out. cut and paste the template from your blogger account and stick it in play/ as index.html. then you can screw around all you want and not mess up your blogger page.

of course, if the site is off of blogger's domain then well, the above is alittle harder to do.

[besson3c]

Technically, the preg_match should be this:

Code:
if (preg_match("/192\.168\.0\.1/",$visitor)) {

Since there is no pattern matching going on here, it would probably be more appropriate to simply do this:

Code:
if ($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] == "192.168.0.1")

I'm just being nitpicky though, what was provided will work...

[design219]

It is a blogger domain. I can't work on it until this evening either.

This may just be a temporary solution, as she googles his name every day, just to see if there is anything new on the web, so it may not fool her for too long. Although, she may not have any idea how to change her IP address.

[zro]

Just tell your "friend" to man up and nail it shut, already. m i ryt?

[design219]

Originally Posted by zro 

Just tell your "friend" to man up and nail it shut, already. m i ryt?

Ha, yeah, well, I did say he is an artist. Not to perpetuate the stereotype, but he's gay, and I don't think he would consider that an option, but I'll pass along the advice. And even if he wasn't, she's psycho-scary.

And he's not me, I just help him with his computer when it acts up.