.htaccess To Block Spammers

[Twitchin Kitten]

For a time it was very common to have "bots" join sites under specific email domains for the sole purpose to spam your board. These email domains are what search engine spiders would see in your members list when crawling your site so when someone went looking for say, Viagra, your site would be a "hit" for it.

Although on the outside it might sound like good free advertising it is in reality NOT. Your site and it's true purpose winds up getting buried on the bottom of the search engine list as more and more bogus members are there.

Now times have changed with the inclusion of CAPTCHA and RE-CAPTCHA on registration forums.

"How so?" you ask? Well now companies hire real live human spammers to do what 'bots' do. They buy up a large amount of disposable email domains, email addresses or even set up disposable ISP's (internet service providers) for the sole purpose of having humans join your site just to get on there and many of them will either PM the membership if permissions for newbies allow or put several bogus posts on the board with links to sites they are hired to spam for.

You can find out that it's often the same person joining ALL your boards if you advertise your sites on one (Like I do here) and sometimes they're even clever enough to use a different username for each one. They will even use multiple registrations because they can work around IP restrictions due to the "disposable ISP" sneakiness!

So what can you do?

Well, when I was running a WowBB board we had huge issues with spam 'bots' and all the help sites shared a list of email domains to be known spammers and we banned them all. Over a short period of time that list became quite large.
It was also necessary to do this the hard way due to the fact that software did not list IP addresses upon registration like other software does.

So now, we move ahead to how to ban by IP address. This is good if you are still using a software like WowBB or WowClassic that does not log IP addresses upon registration.

How do we determine someone comes from a spam heavy area? Easy!
I have a whole country blocked from one of my sites now because I found the same country was registering day after day with over 10 registrations!

So, you check IP addresses on every new member when you see this behavior. If you see a pattern of it coming from the same area, you have a spammer.
Granted, you'll not have that big of an issue all the time and the occasional lone spammer comes around to post and push his site but that's a whole different thing than specific spamming like I am discussing here. Please keep in mind this is not the same as "trolls" that register on sites!

You can ban each one by email address and username but it becomes quite cumbersome and time consuming.
You can ban by IP address in the admin cp as well. It's not as affective as banning by your .htaccess file on the server though.

First you should try banning in your admin cp.
The instructions there are pretty easy on how to ban by IP range.
Keep in mind that banning by IP address bans a wide range of users on the same ISP.

       

As you can see in that second image one of them tried to access the site even though I have the whole range from the first three digits on blocked.

If they are still coming in and registering in droves you can try banning by IP address through you .htaccess file on the server.

You can pick a range of addresses or ban the entire country if you have that big of a problem.

The IP Info DB is where you can generate your list of IP addresses to block.

   

Click the first link in that site that says - IP address country block generator - and find the country you need to block.

Next, click the link for the Htaccess Country Block and follow the instructions CAREFULLY.

For my sites I simply hit the 'view source' button in my browser and copied the info provided and pasted it into my .htaccess file on the server.

BE CAREFUL YOU DO NOT ERASE OR OVERWRITE YOUR CURRENT .htaccess FILE ON THE SERVER NOW! You need it. You need to add the blocked addresses BELOW the info that's on there and upload the file again.

MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR CURRENT FILE BEFORE YOU DO ANY CHANGES!! I am NOT responsible if you fail to back up your stuff before doing anything drastic.

You can read more about this on the MyBB board in this topic -
http://community.mybboard.net/thread-56961.html

Remember - the above is a drastic measure that will block ALL traffic from whatever country you are having issues with. Please do your homework before you ban whole countries!!

Skin City Designs is NOT responsible if you fail to follow instructions or continue with something you do NOT understand. If you do not understand this please post a topic asking for help and I'll point you in the direction of someone who can.