Blocking China with a PHP script

[ron15]

I have used country IP lists in my firewall and I'm still getting undesirable traffic from China.

I would like to try blockscript, but I have not been able to find reviews that I trust. It offer affiliate commissions, so it seems that most reviewers are just trying to sell it.

Has anyone any experience with it? Performance and reliability are my primary concerns. I don't want it slowing down my site, and certainly don't want false positives. I would be interested in the domain license that includes proxy blocking, country blocking and other features.

I noticed the company that is selling it plays both sides of the fence as they offer anonymous proxy services. Is this a bad sign?

[Leosghost]

A block is only as good as the IP list it uses and the free lists are inaccurate..you can filter for proxies too..IIWY I'd look at maxmind...and not the free offer there.

Also visit the spiders forum here..

[ron15]

I guess from the perspective of it using Maxmind GeoLite it would be effective at targeting a specific country. I'm just wondering about the overall operation, reliability, and reputation of the product.

If anyone has actually used it, I would appreciate any insight you may have on it.

[Leosghost]

Geolite is the "free" one..the other ones there are considerably more accurate and updated much more frequently..and thus if you used either of them and your own script you would not need to use "blockscript" ..

[ron15]

I manage my own servers and therefore do a bit of my own scripting, but I think scripting my own solution for blocking is probably beyond my ability.

I believe Blockscript is filtering the HTTP input stream, parsing out IP's, doing a lookup on them, and doing a redirect to a designated page for positively identified IP's. The lookup also includes IP's of proxies and other troublesome sources. They claim to have ~millions of such IP's, updated daily.

All that appears to be of sufficient value for the going price (199.00). I'm just wondering if it actually lives up to its claims.

They have a free version, but with a serious drawback. The free version redirects the blocked connection to a page the clearly identifies the blocking script by name. Not exactly a good idea showing your cards to a potential miscreant. I guess that is a carrot for people to purchase it so that it no longer does that.

[Leosghost]

I believe Blockscript is filtering the HTTP input stream, parsing out IP's, doing a lookup on them, and doing a redirect to a designated page for positively identified IP's. The lookup also includes IP's of proxies and other troublesome sources. They claim to have ~millions of such IP's, updated daily.

If they are using "geolite" then this bit

They claim to have ~millions of such IP's, updated daily.

is "porkys" ;-) especially this bit =>"updated daily"..even the paid data base at maxmind and the live version " web version" doesn't update millions of IPs "daily"..

Any thing that parses millions of IPs and lookups before doing a redirect is going to bring your servers to a crawl..

But an accurate, up to date, country base list combined with a script that checks for proxies and forwarded Ips can run fast enough to be invisible and intangible..to the welcome end user..and the unwanted can be sent to a 403 ( actually inadvisable ) or wherever you want to send them ..a "sorry this page is for you" is better ..or even bounce them to Google ;-)

It is as easy as writing / using a script that looks at "incoming" ..compares with a data base ( real time or stored ) ..checks for forwarded and "switches" or passes based on what it finds..

Plenty of scripts that will do that with a little tweaking are out there..some are even here ;-)..variants upon them posted many times ..rocknbil must have posted at least 3 that use free geo data bases ..I posted one recently in a thread which g1smd was in.. [webmasterworld.com...]

The spiders forum [webmasterworld.com...]

has many scripts and htaccess rules which can be adapted..

[sundaridevi]

i've used maxmind, it is the industry standard. I think many very big ecommerce sites use it. the geolite is sold as 95% accurate. That means if you get 100 Chinese visitors a day, maybe 5 will get through. That is not good enough for most people. You can either pay to subscribe to their premium , very accurate database or purchase an online version that lets you install a simple script that queries their server, then you purchase a bundle of like 20,000 queries. It's not so expensive. I've used both.