Unfortunately that will not stop server access as the server has to be checked for those IP addresses.
Right, but the number of parallel opened guest connections to the database will decrease.
IP range 220.243.* plus many other IP addresses, hundreds of them in fact.Guest
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 11_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.8483.87 Mobile Safari/537.36
Code: Select all
order allow,deny
deny from 220.243.
allow from all
deny from 220.243
or you could use deny from 220.243.0.0/16
If you block them on server level (eg. via .htaccess) then there should be no extra connections
Does that ban them as bots or allow them? I've been trying to ban the IP addresses in the 'banning' section for spammers but I don't think that works as they're not registered using those IPs, they're just guests.
Guests have IP addresses as well so yes it will block them. The problem with banning then via phpBB is that they are still accessing your board and utilising your database server which, with this particular bot, is quite a load.
This is not something that can be handled within phpBB with any degree of success. You need to prevent them form loading the script, using phpBB's IP bans may help some but it will still be making connections to the database. Even the htaccess rules are not the best route but better than using phpBB. The best thing you can do server side is firewall them off but that only works with the right rules and/or known IP's. That also assumes you have access to the firewall, if this is shared hosting account you would have to contact your host and hope they can help.