Attn: All members from India, please send me your IP

Post by **Winston** » June 27th, 2012, 8:44 am

Hi all,
In order to stop all the human spam here everyday, I think I'm going to have to block all IP's from India. I don't know of any other solution. Most of them come from India. Others from Nigeria and Pakistan.

So if you are in India, please post your IP here or PM it to me, so I can make sure to leave it off the list of blocked IP's.

If anyone has any other solutions to the daily problem of human spammers, please let me know.

Thanks,
Winston

xiongmao · Post by **xiongmao** » June 27th, 2012, 9:18 am

Hi Winston,

Have you checked out my dating site? I've got a database of all the IP addresses in the World! I got it from MaxMind.com. And it was free! It's a static database file and there should be some PHP modules on their site. I'm using their C# class library. It's pretty darned accurate, I've only had 1 user with an unknown IP.

It doesn't stop proxy users, but you can pay money for a database of all the proxies in the World if you want to stop the ghosts of former members re-registering lol.

I also bought some nice flag icons, so I've combined the two on my stats page to show where all my members are from.

By the way, most of my scammers are from Senegal and Malaysia.

This also looks interesting: http://www.stopforumspam.com/.

I don't know if you're as geeky as I am, but another way to stop the spam is to write a classifier. All you need to do is feed it spam and legit sample messages, then it will work out if a message is likely to be spam. It basically does this by making a list of words people are or aren't likely to use on your forum. Given how broad your forum topics are, I don't know if this would work so well. But if you had a motorcycle forum then it would do a magnificent job of blocking any posts about pills or real estate etc. I've actually been testing it on my site as I wanted a way of blocking the 419 letter writers, but just blocking anyone from Africa turned out to be an easier solution.

Post by **Winston** » July 10th, 2012, 6:16 pm

Ok well using this IP database service:

http://ipinfodb.com/ip_country_block.php

I just blocked all primary IP's from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nigeria, where most of the spam seemed to be coming from, by blocking them in my htaccess file. Hopefully that will stop most of the spam. GuitarGuy's IP didn't seem to be on the block list, so he should be able to log in.

Post by **Winston** » September 8th, 2013, 12:30 pm

I've just unblocked all the IP's from India in my htaccess file. The reason is that some people in the US were blocked as well. I don't know why. But the error message they were getting indicated that it was due to the blocked IP's in the htaccess file.

So who knows how many others not in India were blocked as a result of this. We could have lost legit traffic from this. So for now, I've unblocked all those IP's to see if our traffic will increase. The risk though, is that the spammers from India doing SEO here may return as well. We will see. Please be on the lookout for them in the next few days.

If you were one of those not from India who could not access this site due to this, please let me know so I can see how many of you were there.

Thanks,
Winston