Anyone have a quick solution to blocking entire countries say Indonesia and Nigeria? I am getting ridiculous amount of fraud orders one right after the other but I want to be careful not to block legitimate countries such as Australia which are close to Indonesia.
http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolocation_landing?rId=google Get a Geotargeting Database here. Then if country = bad_country echo 'bye bye!' . Or if country = country_i_don't_ship_to echo 'adsense'.
I'm sure there was a free 1 someone told me about a couple of months ago. Anyone remember what it was?
I worked out from these files here http://www.maxmind.com/download/geoip/api/php/ what the filename of the .dat database file was. A google search gave me all necessary files for free But remember that you will get updates if you pay for a license. Without it, yuo could soon be blocking legit customers.
rofl that's pretty cheeky. I sometimes forget to change the privelages of the directory folders as well.
The other issue is - most of these people will also use proxy servers as well. So sometimes blocking might not help.
hostip.info is a free service that might interest you. However, IPs of a country can be blocked using IPTables. It does a far more superior job than any other IP databases like Maxmind, Ip2country, hostip etc.. More info : sns.ias.edu/~jns/security/iptables/ netfilter.org
Why block them? Send all your useless traffic to one of those blind traffic sponsors and at least make a buck off of it. Plus when you try to block, they figure out that's what you're doing and try to go around it, ie proxy etc.. If you just redirect them someplace else, they may think nothing of it and move on.
Does any one have the .htaccess code that basically says if extersion signifiies certain country send somewhere else or redirect back to themselves? Shannon
If you run a hosting company its a good idea to block all vietnamese people as 99% of they will abuse your services, they use stolen credit cards to purchase hosting. And then you end up in debt
Smyrl, I've been collecting and blocking ISP newtworks for quite sometime for Nigeria, Romania, and every satellite ISP I can identify . Its a crude solution and requires constant monitoring. My .htaccess file is over 16k and is beginning to burden the server. I'm looking for something more efficient and comprehensive so I too would be interested in what others are doing. BTW, lately some of my advertisers have been getting scam inquiries from .edu, .gov and co.uk networks (usually public libraries). It's easy to spot (their english is terrible and the con is almost always the same) but if my customer service is tied up the scum can sometimes make a dozen inquires before we block them and then we have to follow up and make sure the advertiser does not fall for the scam. Its a PITA Let me know if you find something that works! -jay
Thanks, Jay. This is right up there with referrer spam. Hard to control and as you say .htaccess files are growing large. Shannon