Ban ip address

[NormNM]

This is not really a fault. But the forum is being hit every few minutes from the same place (Hong Kong), 24 hours a day and it is messing up the number of views a post has, all now very high and not really true.

How can this be stopped? Can a part of an ip address be banned? Or any other way of stopping it?

[KevC]

You're probably better off asking your hosts to block it at the server level.

You can ban IPs in the users and groups tab.
You can block whole groups of IPs with a wildcard 123.45.* for instance. Just be careful though because they're not necessarily country specific and they can be bypassed with a VPN.

[NormNM]

Cheers, Thanks for the information.

[ukautoforums]

Is it a bot?

I've got some rules in htaccess to block ones that were slowing my site down. I also use cloudflare and blocked countries.

BrowserMatchNoCase "libwww-perl" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "wget" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "LieBaoFast" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Mb2345Browser" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "zh-CN" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "MicroMessenger" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "zh_CN" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Kinza" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Bytespider" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Baiduspider" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Sogou" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Datanyze" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "AspiegelBot" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "adscanner" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "serpstatbot" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "spaziodat" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "undefined" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "PetalBot" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "trendictionbot" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "SEMrushbot" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "AhrefsBot" bad_bot
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from env=bad_bot

User-agent: SEOkicks
Disallow: /

[warmweer]

Wouldn't it be an option to make a custom group for those bots : based on user_agent, and lots of NEVERs for group forum permissions?