Spam Registrations

[Admin]

Hi

We've experienced an increase in spam registrations, almost entirely from India...that country is the bane of my life. I already have installed a stop country utility that should be preventing black listed countries like india from registering an account. I have increased the settings to include proxies etc. Hopefully, this makes a significant difference as I know you don't want to see lots of spammy posts and account registrations.

 

[RobM]

You've been doing a good job getting these quickly over the past manually. I don't think I have seen a spam post for more than a few minutes. There seems to be a handful of countries responsible for the bulk of the spam. Funny considering a lot of it is fishing for SEO work, website design, or helpline support yet contains appalling grammar, misspellings, and broken English

 

[amfletchers]

^ that is the best timed reply ever! lol

 

[dee]

Lol..... Ankitavarma seems like a nice girl. Hows the old " to wind up observably your date and impact your dreams to work out not surprisingly." going ?

 

[Admin]

OK my country stop spam plugin is clearly not working, anyone any ideas how i stop entire countries from accessing the site?

 

[dee]

You can deny individual IP'S in ht access.Use this

http://www.htaccesstools.com/block-ips/

Trouble is to block a country takes massive blocks of ips.

 

[dee]

Oooh..... try this

https://www.ip2location.com/blockvisitorsbycountry.aspx

 

[Admin]

OK So we've added IP lists for 4 countries on to the end of our current .htaccess
file. There's about 12,000(!) IP ranges in there, let's see if that helps or not.

 

[Admin]

Joy of joys, it's working like a charm .

 

[dee]

If you used that tool, i think its worth updating the ip ranges every couple of weeks or so

 

[lazarus]

With Cloudflair free account you can block whole countries with their website firewall. It's actually really good and rock solid.

 

[Admin]

good point, i forgot about cloudflare but I dont think we'd get the site performance we have now and given we primarily serve to one geolocation..

 

[Wombat]

I have blocked entire IP ranges on my server, China and the Ukraine for instance. It does do the job but it will slow down your server as well. The more IP ranges you block the slower it gets as it will have to check those blocked ranges every time someone knocks on your site's door. Apart from that the real persistent spammers will always hide behind proxy networks which are almost impossible to block.

 

[martin-s]

Better if you can block them at a hardware firewall level