Banning visitors from China and Russia

In website and in phpbb forums

[serengeti]

My website is not useful for Chinese and Russian people (due to the language and subject involved).

I get a lot of spam from a few countries, including the above two.

Is there a way to ban all IP's from those two countries?

I know in phpbb forums you can ban IP's from the control panel, but I am a beginner at this and wanted help banning whole countries.

Thanks.

[Wlauzon]

If it supports the CIDR/Netmask it is pretty easy.

You can enter something like this - note the trailing 0/16 number. Then you have to find the base address for what china uses.

66.167.0.0/16 = 66.167.0.0 through 66.167.255.255 [65536 IPs - Class B]

See [en.wikipedia.org...] for all the variations.

[edited by: Wlauzon at 3:16 am (utc) on Oct. 28, 2006]

[motorhaven]

blackholes.us has lists of IP ranges for most countries. We have 3 far east countries blocked by our firwall (a lot less overhead than doing it via a php script like phpBB or via Apache rules).

[rocknbil]

[dnsstuff.com...] for quick access to CIDR tables for IP's. :-)

[jtara]

Where can I find documentation on using the data at blackholes.us? The home page is completely cryptic to me, simply listing where to get <something> (what?) by various means...