Can I ban an entire country? Lol

100% will prevent bots and spam. The challenge mode does not put anyone on your site without the google chapters. You can try cloudflare. (XX and Tor Challenge .)

I got to challenge all countries, with api. bot and ddos atack stopped :)

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Sometimes I get presented with a cloudflare captcha on visiting a website and I always navigate away. Every single time.
 
Sometimes I get presented with a cloudflare captcha on visiting a website and I always navigate away. Every single time.
This. You don't want to make yourself so secure that users give up rather than deal with your security. A spam-free site that is also user-free accomplishes nothing.
 
With Cloudflare, though, you are choosing which countries to block. I've put up the "challenge" option to those countries we know don't legitimately visit our forums, so nobody is going to see that anyways.

I wouldn't get more strict unless we were having a DDoS attack, which I think will also throw up a challenge until the attack has been mitigated.
 
With Cloudflare, though, you are choosing which countries to block. I've put up the "challenge" option to those countries we know don't legitimately visit our forums, so nobody is going to see that anyways.
One of my problems right now, though, is that I am getting a lot from the US. They are probably using proxies or infected networks or something, but it is a legit market for us (we have 2 or 3 American members) so I'm not really going to flag it the way I might Russia or Vietnam (two of my problem countries).
 
One of my problems right now, though, is that I am getting a lot from the US. They are probably using proxies or infected networks or something, but it is a legit market for us (we have 2 or 3 American members) so I'm not really going to flag it the way I might Russia or Vietnam (two of my problem countries).
For sure. I wouldn't use anything to prevent access from the busiest countries that visit my sites. 👍👍 My main objective is to use Cloudflare to get rid of some of the worst of the countries, which leaves fewer I have to deal with on the server using the firewall or other means. On other servers, I use the method I posted earlier--I download CIDR lists for countries and block them right in the firewall. That way I don't even have to bother with the Cloudflare settings if I don't want to. (Although any little bit helps.)
 
So what is the best and easist way now to ban countries
I want to ban every country in the world except 5 or 6
 
How do spammers get through question captchas?
I am just try this now to see if it reduces my new resgistrations for Russia and Ukraine etc
 
So what is the best and easist way now to ban countries
I want to ban every country in the world except 5 or 6
If running a VPS/dedicated server, one word... CSF. But blocking by CIDR can be defeated by using a proxy based elsewhere.
CloudFlare is another option.
 
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I still block one country via CSF as well, but you may find a benefit with this addon:


Since implementing this, I've reduced my Firewall's config significantly.
 
I think it is much better to ban whole countries to your site (if you want to)
Becasue, even if they don't register, they still crawl your site, wasting your bandwidth and looking for errors

This is why I am looking at getting Cloudfare
 
Ok so what is CIDR and CSF
CSF is a nice little firewall. It does require that you have a VPS or a dedicated server (you can be using some control panels with it).
A fairly informative page with info relating to IP addressing and CIDR is here. Anyone running their own VPS or dedicated server should be familiar with that info. What it basically does is allow you to address a range of IP addresses by using notation like 192.168.0.0/24 and block a whole range of IP addresses without having to address each one individually.
 
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CSF is a nice little firewall. It does require that you have a VPS or a dedicated server (you can be using some control panels with it).
A fairly informative page with info relating to IP addressing and CIDR is here. Anyone running their own VPS or dedicated server should be familiar with that info. What it basically does is allow you to address a range of IP addresses by using notation like 192.168.0.0/24 and block a whole range of IP addresses without having to address each one individually.
I block whole ranges now using eg 192.0.0.0/8 in my webhosts control panel
But you have to be able to find out which ranges to block and that is virtually impossible as there are so many of them.

Unfortuntley when they allocate the new ranges they don't say that 193 is Russia, 194 is The UK 196 is Germany etc
They are all mixed up
 
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I block whole ranges now using eg 192.0.0.0/8 in my webhosts control panel
But you have to be able to find out which ranges to block and that is virtually impossible as there are so many of them.

Unfortunaylty when they allocate the new rnages they don't say that 193 is Russia, 194 is The UK 196 is Germany
They are all mixed up
CSF can do it by 2 alpha codes... like CN, UK, US, etc.
Only issue now is with IPv6. There are so many addresses if your site is IPv6 capable you will have a hard time blocking.
 
They need to re-allocate all the IP addresses so that eg
each IP range has only one country in it
Its all a big mess, and seems to be getting worse with IPv6
 
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