Thread: Block A Country

Block A Country is a neat little website that creates .htaccess rules to block entire countries from accessing your web sites.

This is used most often by web proxies whose owners don't want to be deluged by difficult to monetize traffic from places like Communist China and Iran.

With just a little bit of re-work, the output can be converted into firewall rules ttop this traffic before it ever reaches your web server.

BlockACountry was very useful to me last year, when my server was the subject of a DDOS attack from thousands of IP's across Turkey.

Unfortunately, the lists are not perfect. I received a report that I was accidentally blocking part of Greece with the filter.

With electronic terrorism becoming more popular every year, BlockACountry is a useful tool in the ongoing struggle against boorish behavior on the Internet.

Yep, I use the blockacountry code for all my proxies
It's a great tool but yes.. once I blocked China..and it blocked french users too...

But that's not near China, so....

But yeah.. I got it working after checking some things

Greets

I also use this on my proxies, China, Iran doesn't give us much revenues but they take allot of bandwith :s

greets

Its not they don't give much revenue its that it effects your sites total revenue if you used to get an average of $1 dollar per click on us ca uk etc and then you allow CN IA IR etc non English speaking countries your average click will go way down. If you have only quality traffic + quality content = quality money. Crap traffic+ quality content equals= crap earnings. I dont use an IP block on my sites I use maxmind geoip country block so I can block countries by adding the country codes to my PHP.

Take your proxy and block as many non English speaking countries and after 1 week see how much more per day you are making on less traffic and less clicks.

I blocked some Turkish IP's and all Greece's. I heard bad things about Turkey.. Maybe if they get better I will unblock them.. but for now, no thank you.

Originally Posted by Whoa

I blocked some Turkish IP's and all Greece's. I heard bad things about Turkey.. Maybe if they get better I will unblock them.. but for now, no thank you.

Yeah. Most of the hacks are from there (what i have heard). I got my site hacked in 2007, by someone in Turkey.

You guys need to stop supporting that kind of censorship. You will soon be destroying the entire internet. Internet is a free society and the only place where some freedom is still available.

You should only block a country when you get attacked, not because they give you less money. The world doesnt work that way.
Just one tip to people that actually think it is smart and gains more income if you block countries where people give low clicks. Realize this. If you do business, instead of blocking a part of your potential customers because they dont ask the exact product you have, maybe you should find another product wich DOES sell to them.

Its not that something is being sold its the fact that china traffic will bring a proxy to its death. I have seen proxy site getting over 40000 hits a day at almost 10tb of bandwidth. Middle east not so bad. However you make ZERO income from there traffic with any of the ad networks. They will get your sites smart priced for poor quality traffic. Not to mention the US has trade sanctions in place. So for those of us paying out the butt for servers I am not about to throw my money out the window so someone in the middle east can watch a porn video or someone in China can do whatever it is they do.

Originally Posted by Profithost

You guys need to stop supporting that kind of censorship. You will soon be destroying the entire internet. Internet is a free society and the only place where some freedom is still available.

You should only block a country when you get attacked, not because they give you less money. The world doesnt work that way.
Just one tip to people that actually think it is smart and gains more income if you block countries where people give low clicks. Realize this. If you do business, instead of blocking a part of your potential customers because they dont ask the exact product you have, maybe you should find another product wich DOES sell to them.

I completely understand people blocking countries when their goal is to make money online.

On the other hand, I have spare bandwidth and CPU cycles right now. Maybe I should put up some proxies just for Chinese users.

I think that Aquarezz (another Dutch member) has a really good approach. He's redirecting the Chinese proxy traffic from all of his proxies to one proxy where he's building ads specifically targeted towards the Chinese market.

I used censorship on Turkey for a lot of my sites. Couldn't help it I had hackers from Turkery so I said screw it I'm banning Turkey. Best thing I ever did.