I can’t see an Admin option to block IP or a range of IPs, is there one?
Thanks!
I can’t see an Admin option to block IP or a range of IPs, is there one?
Thanks!
Yes, go to Admin, Logs, Screened IPs. either star wildcard or the crazy standard subnet nomenclature will work.
Thanks!
so 10.20.30.* will work?
Yes, that is the same as
10.20.30.0/24
But for
10.20.*.*
you need to do
10.20.0.0/16
Look for CIDR masking if you dare
10.20.* should also work as expected.
Is there any kind of character limit here? We are going to need to block entire countries by company policy.
Have access to root? You can ban entire countries at the kernel level with iptables.
I know it’s a little politically sensitive, but could anyone share a good list of IP address ranges to block for a site that runs just for a local community in the UK? A block list that removes countries like Nigeria, China, Russia etc.
Are you running akismet?
No, I don’t have akismet set up but I certainly will do if I start getting spammed.
One moment there… You are not getting spammed and still want to block huge portions of the planet?
Yes. Perhaps we can discuss political correctness in a different thread? I’m running a forum for people within a small region of South East London. The value to me of protecting against the worst offending spammer nations is far greater than the cost of excluding a tiny number of casual visitors from around the world who might stumble upon my forum.
IMHO a compromise would be the better approach than an all out preemptive Blacklisting.
Kind of a “extremely harsh manual roll-up”
That is, wait for some SPAM to happen.
Say it’s IP is “123.123.123.123”
What Discourse does automatically is when more SPAM happens from
“123.123.123.124”, “123.123.123.125” etc. it Blacklists “123.123.123.0/24”
That is, all IPs beginning with “123.123.123.__”
As long is your forum’s target audience is only very local, you could do the roll-up yourself.
eg. SPAM happens from “123.123.123.123” you check and find that those using that IP should have no legitimate interest in joining your forum.
You could add “123.123.123.0/24” yourself without waiting for Discourse to do a roll-up.
Take care with this approach. bit masking IPs isn’t exactly the easiest thing to understand and doing it wrong might Blacklist innocents
But… You don’t have a problem now? I don’t see why you need to do anything here?
It is generally a bad idea to build things speculatively based on imagined problems you might have.
That said I strongly recommend using our Akismet plugin for every Discourse site. Human spammers are a huge and growing problem across the entirety of the Internet. (Akismet is built in to all our hosting plans.)