I'm getting hammered by spam requests. I allow guest comments that require pending and got over 20,000 of them in a very short space of time. 99% are from Ukraine or China. To bypass this I have used my .htaccess file to completely block all IPs from China, Ukraine and Russia. The problem I have now is that these IPs also seem to be blocking users from Italy and I've seen a few blocked IPs from France. The IP getting blocked is not in my .htaccess file. There are a few rules that block IPs within a range, but the IPs that are getting blocked arent even in the first 3 blocks. e.g. The ip getting blocked might be 123.123.321.321. There are no IPs in my .htaccess file that start with 123.123.321, so I don't see why these are getting blocked. I ran some tools and have confirmed (using proxys) that at least Italy is getting blocked.I am worried now that if I were able to find 2 blocked countries in a few hours, how many others are being blocked. What's the best way around this?I ran a test using http://cloudmonitor.ca.com/en/checkit.php All passed except for Padova and Hong Kong which both got access denied. The IP range for Italy should be this 94.124.34.0/24http://www.tcpiputils.com/browse/ip-address/94.124.34.0-94.124.34.255. The closest match in my .htaccess file is this 94.124.0.0/20 94.124.16.0/21There shouldn't be a conflict here, so I'm really confused
Why does blocking IP addresses from China and Ukraine to fight spam also block some legitimate European visitors?
htaccess;spam;traffic;ip address