I'm thinking about banning every IP address from India from my message board

I get about 1-2 people from India signing up to my board every day and they're all spammers. Since I screen and research each person beforehand, I'm thinking banning all of India's IP addresses would save me time and hassle. Has anyone else done this?

It's an obesity help forum by the way, and I have yet to have one legit member from India vs. the 100+ spammers.

Am I wrong for wanting to do this?

 

Some of them could be very good people too. Banning IPs is limiting your audience. I would not recommend.

 

Nope, already banned most indian ISP's from registering on my site, just do it.

 

Just ban them from accessing the sign up page. In IIS you can filter out IP ranges to specific files so they just get an error when they hit register.php. If you are on Nix I am sure there is a way to do that too. I just dont know how with out looking.

This way you do not limit people reading your forums, but you do weed out the junk signups coming from that way.

 

I've found them to all be in the 59.xxx.xxx.xxx range, what IPs did you ban?

 

If a legit person from India wants to sign up still, could you give them a more complicated method, such as having to email you or something?

Just curious.

 

That is my concern too.

 

If your site is based on something only people in say the US or UK would be interested in, then blocking any thing from outside of that demographic would likely not hurt things. Yeah, yeah, you may find one or two people that may find a genuine interest, but overall, if you do not cater to those outside of your country, then it is likely not going to put a real dent in things.

Though, if you are international at all, then you may wish to keep things as they are now.

 

We banned the hostname of the ISP they were mainly coming from, not sure what it is off the top of my head though.

With SMF it's pretty simple to ban people from registering with certain hostname etc, I'd imagine other software is pretty similar.

 

My site is international, and I have people from all over the world who join, although mostly places like the US, Canada, Australia, UK, etc.....

It's an obesity help website.

 

Then the call is yours. You need to figure out how many people you currently have from there, then figure out if it's worth lossing a like number (based on future registrations) and weight that against deleting the spam accounts.

Most of my spam comes from russia *shrug*

 

I have 0 legit members from India compared to the 100+ spammers I've had to ban from India.

So that equated to a ratio of 0/100+, or about 0%.