[Plugin: Wordfence Security] Blocking certain spiders

Hi!

I’ve been getting a lot of “traffic” from search engine spiders in Russia and China. I do not do business with anyone in either of those countries. So far, I’ve been blocking the IP addresses (and making them permanently blocked) but that’s becoming tedious. These spiders have a LOT of IP addresses they can use.

Question: If I block the spiders via .htaccess, will they be blocked BEFORE my Wordfence even sees the hits? If so, then can I assume that they won’t show in the Live Traffic report? Is there some way to test and verify this?

Thanks in advance!

P.S. If anyone would like to see the code I put into .htaccess for blocking these spiders, let me know and I’ll post it for all to see. I got various bits of it from several places and put it all together.

-Steve