IP banning an entire nation.

No, seriously, has anyone done it?

[grelmar]

Now, I'm an open source, populist kind of guy. I actually believe the Net should be a place for all people from all nations to be able to get and share information.

But lately, I've been looking at the "where" of spam URLs, and the IPs that the spam posts are coming from. And I've noticed the following trend:

Depending on the board, 90-95% of post spam is coming from Russia.

I'm not seeing any "real" users from Russia.

It galls me to think of writing off an entire nation from my forums, but looking at the cost/benefit ratio, it's starting to look more and more like a real option.

It would be trivially easy to do.

Has anyone here done this? If so, has it been effective?

Any thoughts on the moral implications of doing this?

[JollyK]

Yes, a lot of people have done it. There have been threads here about it too. Lots of people with retail sites block several African nations that have a high percentage of credit-card fraud, spam, and so forth. (Senegal, Nigeria, and Guinea Bissau seem to be where most of the 419 and "come work in Canada hotel we pay you visa for you country" scams are coming out of at the moment). Some people have blocked most of Eastern Europe and Asia (lots of credit card fraud coming out of Indonesia and the Philippines). Some people limit it to blocking email from one or two countries. Several people do block Russia and other countries especially from forums.

I've blocked IP blocks that have more spam than legitimate traffic, but not an entire country yet. I feel a bit badly every time I do, though, because I know that there are a few legitimate users of those IP's that are suffering for the actions of their $$%#^#$& countrymen. I also take the IP blocks off every few months just to see if the traffic has improved, or if it's still mostly scams and spams.

Actually, after much consideration and agonizing, I have recently banned AOL users completely from one of my sites. (Isn't AOL a small country in itself?)

Yes, it's been very effective for me.

I don't know if it's a question of morality per se, but there's definitely a question of, should the few bad apples spoil the batch for everyone else? It all comes down to how much "good" traffic comes out of those IP's vs how much "bad" traffic. If the bad far outnumbers the good, sometimes all you can do is ban the IP block.

Or just keep dealing with the bad traffic in order to keep things accessible for everyone.

I will say that I have never done it without a lot of argument with myself, though, and I'm never entirely comfortable with it. I console myself that A) anyone is free to make their own website and invite all their friends and B) there are thousands of other websites on the Internet where people can go if I block them.

JK

[rogerd]

I had a web host ban AOL once. They were the hosting arm of a major DSL firm - competent technically but really living in their own world. They were getting hammered from some AOL IPs, so they just pulled the plug on huge blocks of AOL. Needless to say, this didn't sit well with their customers and the decision was reversed in less than 24 hours.

[bobothecat]

Has anyone here done this? If so, has it been effective?

Yep, I've banned several countries... Russia, China, India, all of Africa, and a few others.

I haven't noticed any downturn in business by doing so, and I don't feel bad about it in the least.