banning guests from "Who's Online"

[mustangt562]

is there a way to ban ip address from the "who's online" page? My purpose in doing this is to ban certain ip address from eastern europe and africa cause there is absolutely no reason for people from those parts of the world to be on my board but to spam or hack. Thanks

[Bradley_Wint]

So you want to ban them completely basically?

Most likely it's just a search indexing robot doing site scans you know...

read this thread for summary on IP banning

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=122832

[mustangt562]

Even though when I look up their ip it says its from "riga, latvia" or "Kiev" or ".ru". Do search indexing robots come from eastern europe? Please support what your saying with facts. Otherwise reverse ip says eastern europe and NOT "googlebot...etc" and im playing it safe.

Oh and I know about banning manually i was looking for a faster easier way, maybe a mod or something to ban from the "who's online" page like I ORIGINALLY ask in my FIRST post.

by the way im using http://cqcounter.com/whois/ to look up these ip's.

[Bradley_Wint]

Originally Posted by mustangt562

Even though when I look up their ip it says its from "riga, latvia" or "Kiev" or ".ru". Do search indexing robots come from eastern europe? Please support what your saying with facts. Otherwise reverse ip says eastern europe and NOT "googlebot...etc" and im playing it safe.

are you trying to be rude to me...or do you live in a bubble...are you saying the only people allowed to have search engines are people in the Western Hemisphere. There are a lot of search engines...you know when domains expire and you get the stupid search page...those are also real search engines which need to be backed up by a search bot...sometimes i get some weird pages crawling my site but it's just a bot... there are the few occasions when things are wrong,...e.g. DDOS...once on my old board, over 400visitors within the same ip range were visiting so I knew something was wrong so I banned them...but otherwise...leaving the bot to search your site is good. Also you can just use a Robots.txt file so they won't search unnecessary pages...I have attached one...it will reduce the number of visitors (bots) for one, because they only search the relevant pages...

I know there is a mod where you can ban users directly from the threads, etc..but not sure about direct interface ip bans...

[mustangt562]

Ok im sorry I was sarcastic. Im just VERY VERY leary about anything from eastern europe and africa, and when it comes to administrating a forum im a complete newb and DREAD anything happening to my site. If they are bots from eastern europe will that affect US engines? I mean my forum is pretty useless outside of the US as it is geared toward the medical field here in America. How and where do I install the robot.txt file? Thanks for helping me dispite my sarcasm, that honestly displays real character

[Bradley_Wint]

Just upload the robots files into your root dir and it will do it's magic... even if your site is strictly US stuff, you just can't stop them bots...don't sweat it man...If you want to be secure, just set it so member verify their accounts with activations so bots can't bypass.