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Paranormalis gets scraped by a lot of Russian bots and it slows it down sometimes. Also, lots of bot/fake accounts, despite all the anti-spam measures in place. I finally decided to go ahead and block the entirety of Russia from accessing the forum.
This has nothing to do with the "blocking Russia" or "no more business with Russia" thing we've seen everywhere since early 2022. It's 100% about blocking bots. And the number of Russian bots scraping the site has increased a ton this year. That's what made me do it.
We won't miss anything. We don't have any active members (or occasional members at all) from Russia as far as I know. It's only bots. It will hopefully make the site faster and more stable.
I found this tool, which generates IP range lists from countries in the output format of your choice. In my case, I chose to go the HTACCESS way. So I checked "Russian Federation" and "Apache htaccess Deny". I ended up with a list of over 24 000 deny entries that I added to the forum's HTACCESS file.
That did the trick!
Create an Access Control List to Block Countries or Continents
Originally posted on Num7's blog
This has nothing to do with the "blocking Russia" or "no more business with Russia" thing we've seen everywhere since early 2022. It's 100% about blocking bots. And the number of Russian bots scraping the site has increased a ton this year. That's what made me do it.
We won't miss anything. We don't have any active members (or occasional members at all) from Russia as far as I know. It's only bots. It will hopefully make the site faster and more stable.
I found this tool, which generates IP range lists from countries in the output format of your choice. In my case, I chose to go the HTACCESS way. So I checked "Russian Federation" and "Apache htaccess Deny". I ended up with a list of over 24 000 deny entries that I added to the forum's HTACCESS file.
That did the trick!
Create an Access Control List to Block Countries or Continents
Originally posted on Num7's blog
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