Country Restriction Script

[jdelasko]

Originally Posted by Opserty

The lengths some people are prepared to go to reduce spam ceases to amaze me

It's not about reducing spam. It's about eliminating unwanted visitors to your site that are there for nothing other than hacking attempts and other malicious things. Most of the hacking attempts on my site originate from .cn .ru .de and a few other domains. If my site is about american baseball, what possible reason can I have for allowing these countries to access my site??? I have yet to see a single hacking attempt originate from a US IP address. Everyone that hasn't been living in a cave knows that blocking IP addresses and email addresses are 2 tactics that are completely useless. Blocking entire countries makes good sense in many cases. If I am not offering some sort of global service, why on earth shouldn't I block entire countries?

--------------- Added [DATE]1197875135[/DATE] at [TIME]1197875135[/TIME] ---------------

Originally Posted by valdet

Could you share your solution to block specific countries to access the website. I am also highly interested in doing this for one of my sites.

As an alternative, you can also check out this site: http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecountry

I recently had my hosting company move my site to a new server in preparation for running the GeoIP Apache API. If you are on a dedicated server, things are pretty straightforward. On a shared server, hosting companies get pretty cautious when you ask them to run a new API on that shared server. That's why my hosting comany moved me to a less populated server. Once the Apache API is running on my server, all I will have to do is upload a database file and add a few lines to a .htaccess file and I'm all set... no coding, no vbulleting hacks.... nothing. I won't even have to set up an sql database.

Even if you do block entire countries, you can still allow access from IP addresses that you specify even if they originate from a blocked country.