Ban Hammer focuses on one feature: blocking spammy email patterns and IPs from registering, signing in, or commenting. The plugin keeps the implementation deliberately small, persisting the ban list as serialised data in wp_options and rendering the management UI as a textarea. The textarea works at small scale and becomes a liability once the list grows past a couple of hundred entries, because nothing about a textarea is sortable, filterable, deduplicated, or scoped per role.

SleekView reads the Ban Hammer option entries directly. Each banned pattern becomes a row with type (email or IP), value, added-at timestamp, and last-hit timestamp where the plugin captures it. Filter by type. Sort by added-at to see new additions. Save the view and the textarea stops being the source of truth for a list the team needs to maintain together.

Ban enforcement remains entirely the plugin's responsibility. SleekView adds the management surface, deduplication tools, and audit trail that a textarea fundamentally cannot provide once the list grows.

Ban Hammer is a focused plugin that has stayed deliberately small over the years, which is exactly why long-running sites end up with ban lists that contain hundreds or thousands of entries. The textarea management surface that works for a fresh install becomes an operational liability once the list outgrows a single screen, because nothing about a textarea supports sort, filter, deduplication, timestamps, or notes. SleekView reads the underlying wp_options entry, normalises it into one row per pattern, and renders the list as a workspace.

Stale entries become visible. Duplicates surface immediately. Notes capture why each entry exists, which is what the team needs months later when someone asks 'why did we ban this'.

Enforcement remains the plugin's responsibility. The team gains the management surface that the original textarea was never designed to be, and the ban list stops being a write-only artefact that no one wants to clean up.