How do I block Pakistanis?

[pietpetoors]

I have about 10 to 20 spammers registering on my Free Classifieds web site each day. If I check the IP addresses it sows that 99% of them are from Pakistan and India.

Is it possible to block those two countries completely?
The Free Classified site is a South Africa site and I do not need these guys on my site.

[eitai2001]

You need to install some spam protection like reCaptcha or something for the registration and classified submission processes.

[Dave A]

A couple of useful links:

http://www.find-ip-address.org/ip-country/

http://www.countryipblocks.net/

A warning though - IP range blocks probably isn't going to solve the problem on its own as a persistent spammer will use proxy servers to get around the block.

[pietpetoors]

Spam

Thanx Dave, I guess you are right about the proxy server.
I block these guys as they register, the classified site has a facility for that. I can see some of the blocks are successful, the count shows that it blocked them a couple of times and other of the blocks just nether show that it blocked them.

Imagine life without spammers, there will be so much more time to do the things we like.

[desA]

Perhaps you need a few pertinent questions for your gate guard?

For example:
How to spell Moodley? M o nudda o didley why
Who tied your dog loose?
Are you Reddy? No, I'm Chetty.

Some SA colloquialisms that they will not know the answer to if they are outside of SA.

(Some tongue in cheek here. )

[AndyD]

The Ukraine's are the worst for spamming in my experience but the forums I mod are based in Holland so maybe that makes a difference. The Pakistanis and Indians aren't too far behind though.

There's two problems, the bots and the person spammers. The bots are generally predictable, you tend to find they fill out all the available fields when setting up a profile. I thought about creating a profile page with fields that wouldn't be visible to a person, dummy fields if you will, and anyone filling these out would automatically be post banned or at least mod previewed until verified. This would catch most of the bots. The bots will also target one forum in particular, probably one with 'general' or 'introductions' in the heading.

The real person spammersare more difficult to catch. Usually if the same iprange is used for spam multiple times in a short space of time we would ban that range for a week or two if no other members showed in the multi member logger for that range. There are blocklists available for known spammers but they're only as good as the guys that maintain them. The spammers are good at what they do, and with dynamically acquired ipaddresses you'll be blocking potential genuine users as well.

There's also lists of known proxy ranges available but these lists are very fluid and genuine members may be using proxies for legitimate reasons.

You're right about one thing, it's a full time occupation.

Most of the newer bot scripts can get through captcha defence systems although it will stop the older bots. I personally hate the captcha systems, they're a pain in the ass.

[Dave A]

For a year I had the gatekeeper question for TFSA in Afrikaans, and that worked really well. But I was prevailed upon to go back to English...