Pokemaster, is it possible to block specific IP ranges?

Question

I ask because we've been getting quite a lot of spam recently, from accounts using very similar IP addresses. There's always been spam in the admin, but there's so much of it right now that it sometimes outnumbers actual posts made by people. It's been going like this for quite some time now (several months) and it's becoming quite a nuisance to block and IP ban each and every one of these accounts.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall from a while ago that you can ban certain IP ranges (eg every address starting with 123.123) if need be. Right now would be an appropriate time to do so, if you can. Here are some of the addresses - the trend becomes clear fairly quickly. If you'd like a record of all these spam accounts, see this page and the ones following; each of the accounts that fits within the obvious naming trend will have an IP similar to one of the ones below. There's at least a hundred of them.

>182.186.206.157
182.186.193.83
182.186.147.169
39.36.219.84
182.186.131.93
39.36.18.179
39.36.170.171
39.36.32.240

I feel that now would also be a good time to bring up an idea I had, which would be a thread we could use to report certain IP addresses and any trends we see with spam accounts. Having a way to put a quick end to these spam bots would save a lot of time and bother.

Comments

Agreed. So many questions waiting to be approved are usually scam advertisements. They don't even make an effort to disguise it; even in the link itself it says scam.

Try harder if you want to catch us :P

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^Not the first time I've heard that. Thankfully, this site is well protected thanks to the caring mods. Let's face it, most sites have totally incompetent admins.

Answer 1

It is possible to block ranges, but I don't think it's feasible to do that. Blocking everything starting with 182.186 for example will block massive areas (over 60,000 people). And spammers will just find new IPs to use instead.

I'll take a look at the spam and try to find a better solution, maybe blocking specific words or phrases would be better.

Edit: just took a look at the blocked IPs and there were so many from 182.186.*.* and 39.36.*.* that I decided it probably is worth blocking them.