« Articles / Singapore Geo-blocking

2026.04.02

35

0 comments

» Start a forum discussion.

I tried loading the forum earlier today and the built-in session throttle stopped it from loading.
Once I increased the limit a bit, it loaded and we had 500 simultaneous 'guest users' on the forum, which wasn't putting a very big demand on the server.

The vast majority of these bot users have always originated from Singapore.
I traced a number of these IPs back to a network provider: ByteDance, that is actually Chinese-owned.

One thing you notice about their website is that it has no means of reporting any abuse of their network (assuming that the bot traffic actually is an unauthorised use of their network).
You can find all sorts of other interesting things about the company, here.

The second thing I notice from their website is how non-Chinese the company's board of directors is.

In any case, I blocked all IP ranges for this provider, along with the long-standing block for Alibaba Cloud.
That brought the number of sessions down to about 200.

My problem with excluding all IP ranges for specific providers is that, for every request, the server has to evaluate a huge number of lines in the htaccess file.

I decided to block all requests from Singapore to the forum, which, to me, is the least-bad of a bad range of options.
There is an extension for phpBB that handles this kind of geo-blocking.
However, I was sad to see that the creator of that extension: Mark D. Hamill had died last year.
Mark seems to have contributed hugely to phpBB and its users.

Rather than relying on an extension that probably can't ever receive any updates, I looked into doing it at the server level. 

Lightspeed and Apache have the same mechanism as the phpBB plugin where they can use the GeoIP plugin or MaxMind database to evaluate where the agent's IP provider is located.

Anyway, after enabling this, the number of guest users on the forum is down to low double figures, which we'll run with for the time being.

Comments

Ruby
I don't have any comments for this article yet.
Why not leave us one?

Article View

← Previous articleNext article →

Article list
Archive

Contact
Large File Area
Links
Article list Star Fleet Teams
Theme Select