Block visitors by geographic location

Is this even possible?

[ichthyous]

I have been looking in this forum for info on how to block visitors to my site from specific countries but I haven't found anything. I would like to prevent people from Eastern Europe and some Asian countries from visiting my site as they suck up bandwidth, steal my images and remove the copyright info, etc. Is it possible to block visits by geography or would that be a huge task?

[phranque]

that depends on whether you merely have a list of countries that harbor bandwidth-sucking copyright thieves or whether you have actually narrowed it down to some ip addresses?
it is far easier to block ip addresses.

it's actually a very difficult problem.
here is a white paper on geolocation [ccsl.carleton.ca].

[benevolent001]

its fairly possible to do it using mod_geoip see maxmind website for more details

i have been doing it in past on my old host to ban few african nations , am going to do it same on my new host too , but am not able to install mod_geoip on my new server thats what delaying it

[wilderness]

There are websites which offer IP ranges broken down by country.

After downloading those ranges, you would then covert the ranges to Rewrites that deny access to the ranges. (you will need to pay attention as some of the ranges will be duplicated).

It's not 100& effective, however you may be assured of a good success rate.

It is time consuming to do this manually, however in the event that your task is far smaller eastern euro countries the ranges should be very small.

4-5 years ago I went through the entire APNIC ranges, denying the majority, while my goal was to allow access for the Oceanic countries.
The results remain implemented today, however I've even reduced access for some of the Oceanic countries.

Later (than 4-5 years ago) denial of access was added for the majority of RIPE ranges. An occasional new addition to registrar changes slips through, however for the most part remains effective.

AFRIC and LACNIC are denied as well.