Blackhole Pro

Blackhole Pro is a WordPress security plugin designed to detect and automatically block malicious bots that try to access your website. Developed by Jeff Starr, this plugin uses a clever honeypot trap system: it adds a hidden link in your site's footer and a rule in your robots.txt file that forbids all bots from following it. Legitimate bots respect that rule, but malicious bots, leechers, scanners, and spammers ignore it and fall straight into the trap, getting permanently blocked across your entire site.

The plugin is intended for WordPress administrators who suffer from suspicious traffic, constant aggressive crawling attempts, or excessive server resource consumption. Its operation is silent and automatic: it does not interfere with real visitors or your daily work in the admin panel. The most popular search engines are automatically included in the whitelist, so your SEO ranking is not affected.

Blackhole Pro offers total control over your site's protection. You can adjust the threshold level to decide how many warnings a bot receives before being blocked, customize warning and blocking messages, set up custom redirects for blocked bots, and choose the HTTP status codes that are returned. It also includes email notifications with complete WHOIS information for each blocked bot, and a full bot log with detailed data such as IP address, user agent, request made, and automatic geographic location.

Bot management is very comprehensive: you can manually add bots by IP address, delete selected bots with one click, search and filter the log with custom sorting, and view the total number of blocked accesses. Additionally, the plugin allows you to create whitelists and blacklists based on user agent or IP ranges, and exclude the trap link on specific pages or posts.

Built with native WordPress APIs, Blackhole Pro works in harmony with other security plugins and is optimized for lightweight performance. It includes complete documentation integrated into every admin screen, accessible via the Help tab, and allows you to restore all default settings with one click. If you are coming from the free version, you can automatically import all your blocked bot data for a seamless transition.

• Automatically blocks malicious bots, leechers, scanners, and spammers
• Protects server resources for legitimate visitors and good bots
• Complete bot log with IP, user agent, and geolocation data
• Email notifications with WHOIS information for each blocked bot
• Whitelists and blacklists by IP or user agent with range support
• Customizable messages, redirects, and HTTP codes
• Integrated documentation on every admin panel screen