Blocking a country IP?

Have you ever blocked a country IP address from your forum?

If so, why did you do it and how did it work out for you?

The reason I ask is because I own a forum where 99% plus, of the members who join from a particular country post nothing but spam and then get banned. Moderation would be much easier, if I simply banned that country's IP. However, I'm not comfortable doing this because it feels immoral.

Are there alternative ways of dealing with this issue?

Thanks!

 

Nothing immoral about it. I'm doing that on 5 forums.

It's simply a matter of statistics. The vast majority of spam does come from certain areas and I have no compunction about filtering those,It's rare that anyone even inquires as to why there registration was rejected. If they do, depending on what they say, I sometimes manually create a membership for them.

On some forums, there may be additional reasons for doing this, e.g., if your forum is specific to on geographical region there may well be no point in accepting registrations from outside that region.

 

Or you could just put a Captcha on your site that cannot have its answer Googled, and a majority of the spam will stop. Sure, you will still get the regular spammer, trolls, etc., but the bots will go away.

 

I admire your enthusiasm but not much is immune to spambots, especially not Captcha.

And human spammers are at least as big a problem.

 

@Fergal, Re

Spammers are thieves who want to steal YOUR bandwidth without permission for their own benefit, so deserve little mercy.
Spammers are parasites.

We have had to make similar choices, in our case we found it was unacceptable to ban countries, as there may be some victims from said countries that need help. And they take priority.

You can do a whole IP block on the IP range that the worse spammers are using.
Another option is to ban the country's IP for say a couple of weeks, to let the spammers see that their efforts are in vain.

There is a VB mod that stops non humans from registering, by not allowing any registration that is done in a very short time (seconds) that can be quite effective.

 

More importantly, if you're using vBulletin, you can use a multi-pronged approach:

• vbStopForumSpam(or the alternative - I prefer the simpler one) to check the StopForumSpam database and block known spammers.
• Spambot Stopper to block many/most bots.
• Country Moderations to filter registrations by geographical location.

 

Totally agree. But, just as with server security, using multiple strategies does at least minimize the annoyance.

 

Code a bot to by-pass every type of spam known to man in a couple of minutes? That's a stretch!

 

Actually, he said "bypass every type of spam protection" and those bots already exist.

 

I made a typo and I offer myself up for the cross, lol.

Seriously though, the point still stands, no one can write a bot which can by-pass all the protections, much less do it in a few minutes. Unless there's some new development tool I haven't seen in my 30 years of programming it's not happening. No such coder exists, and no such bot exists. Why? Well, they don't need to! Bot writers don't put that much effort into it until a protection becomes widespread. They go after the easier low hanging fruit. Keep ahead of the curve of what is wide spread and you effectively stop all the automated stuff. I can't remember the last time my forums were hit with automated spam, its been more than a year.

 

Thanks all for your replies and helpful suggestions. Just to clarify, the spam I am referring to is from human spammers, we have managed to block quite a bit of the automated spammers, using a human verification question on registration and StopForumSpam.

Thanks again.

 

Turning off links for the first X number of posts deals with human spammers effectively. I have found once they attempt to post and see it gets rejected due to the link they move on.

About the country issue - I have about a dozen countries blocked off plus several thousand data centers (blocks not only the automated bots but many tor nodes, vpns and anonymous proxies).

 

a few forum owners i know are testing out captcha system http://areyouahuman.com/demo/ of course still doesn't prevent human spammers

 

@Cerberus - does what you say also include bypassing http://areyouahuman.com/demo/ ?

 

I do actually use that and it is not as effective as I'd like. It's currently set to three posts before a member can post a link and human spammers are prepared to make the junk posts before posting the link. It was previously set to ten posts, but that actually made the problem worse - spammers came in and made ten posts and then posted their link. In other words, setting the link restriction to ten posts resulted in more spam on my forum.

How many posts do you set the limit at?

 

What do those bots actually do, what is their function?