That's right, I want to lay the smackdown with my trusty banhammer on the whole country. I notice that most spambots come from there. However, even after a few Google searches I'm not sure exactly which IP ranges I should ban and whether it may affect others outside the Philippines from access.
Edit: I realise spam prevention plugins exist, but personally I don't like them. I use recaptcha and Security Questions, but Stop Forum Spam caused a lot of problems for legitimate potential members. I could imagine other plugins with the same goal may be the same. I noticed
this one as being able to block countries, but it says "also" that is a feature, and that's the only feature I want, not the anti-spam stuff. Just any tips on the IP ranges I'll need to ban would help.
Cloudflare would be your best get.
(2012-03-14, 01:43 PM)Ansem Wrote: [ -> ]Cloudflare would be your best get.
That would only block them in a sense as showing captchas but not entirely give them a 403 error.
When you block the folowing ip-parts will solve some problems.
207.46.12.*
207.46.13.*
180.76.5.*
180.76.6.*
Every day, every hour and every minute they where online, reading post after post. They read more then a normal human could do. Reason it was a very active spider.
The problem for me it was that it used to much bandwidth, after blocking them it saved me 60% of bandwidth.
I wouldn't block the whole country.
Most of my spammers came from China & Russia, but when I checked the IPs, they were all originated from servers; VPS, VPNs, Dedicated servers.
So I block the IP ranges that belonged to those services.
I usually do a whois on the IP addresses of spammers, and that's how I see that most come from the Philippines. Unfortunately often the IP addresses are very different, making it difficult to figure out how to stop them. I already have enough protection as far as registration goes, and I don't want to scare away new members by making registration more complicated. I have had some from Russia, but not many from China.
Although, considering spinning's post, a lot of accessing has come from China, and I believe Baidu is a Chinese search engine, no? I could imagine why there are a lot of Chinese spiders. To add any sites with content that is considered politically incorrect to the Chinese gov to the Great Firewall of China's blacklist. And I am noticing a lot of viewers from the IPs spinning posted, so thanks, I'll try that out even if it won't fix the spammer problem. It will be nice to have more bandwidth.
Also, thanks for the link Yaldaram. I'll have to think about blocking the country. Honestly, I doubt it would be a big loss, but any other suggestions would be welcome. Of interest, how did you identify the IPs as from VPS/VPNs/dedis, weBex?
Edit: spinning, are you adding the IPs via MyBB's banning pages or htaccess/other methods? And if I added IPs to htaccess, I assume just editing the file in my site's index and following the steps on the site Yaldaram linked to would do the trick. I was just unsure of whether it would work recursively in the site index (i.e. the htaccess file with the bans applies to all child directories, including the forum).
If you are on VPS (linux), install CSF (Config Server Firewall).
Through it you can easily add country blocks with country codes, for example, blocking Philippines would just need PH to be entered in country block. The rest DNS lookup would be done by CSF and blocking those.