Admin techie guys, if you blocked ips 6 months ago should you unblock them now?
 

6 months ago I blocked the entire country of africa from my site to keep out the scammera from africa.

Now, 6 months later, I got 3 emails from regular members saying they cant access the site theyre blocked.
So should I just delete ALL the ips in my bloked list?
I dont know if theyre changing constantly and a 6 month old ip is worthless now.
thanks

what type of site are you talking about?

What do you mean a 6 month old IP is worthless?

He means that person might not even be using that IP anymore and thus worthless to keep banned.

I typically only block entire ranges of IPs for a short period of time.

Even though the ISP owns entire chunks in a given range thanks to the wonders of release and renew and the nature of a DHCP connection those IPs probably belong to vastly different customers in that service by now.

who will know :)

I doubt Africa got a new set of IP's.

I take it Africa is not your favorite country :1orglaugh:helpme:error

not sure that's the point

lol @ the entire country of africa.

a dating site. I get a TON of nigerian spammers, and scammers from africa in general

No I mean after theyre blocked they might be long gone and using other ips, and other people get new ips, so an innocent member might get the ip range I blocked and be locked out

Just get the ip ranges of all countries in Africa once a year and update your file.

http://www.blockacountry.com/

Does "all of Africa" mean you just blocked X.*.*.*, or do you have some script that is able to pull all relevant blocks from a geoIP database?

Many people still think that blocking 202.*.*.* and 210.*.*.* blocks worthless Asian traffic... but that IP range is actually assigned to the ASIA PACIFIC area, which includes Australia and New Zealand.

Don't confuse GFY with Geography :)