IP block to slow

“…when a blocked competitor visits our site…”

What a curious thing! Why would you even bother trying to block competitors via IP from viewing your site?

It would be ridiculously simple for them to view your site regardless simply by asking a a friend or colleague to see it via their phone/desktop/device.

Not to mention that many IPs are dynamically assigned so while you may be able to block traffic from a purposed corporate server’s IP, the minute they go home, you can’t possibly know the IP of their home network, and therefore they can still see it.

Anyways – you may be indeed reporting a valid issue that Wordfence should look at, but I couldn’t get around the really misguided concept of “blocking competitors from seeing my site”…

@bluebearmedia I see you never had trouble with someone stealing your content shortly after publishing a post. And against some lazy persons using the same network and just copying and pasting the content, IP/ network blocking is a great possibility – if it works correctly. And by the way, it is not up to you to judge whether this is a valid issue or not ??

Actually, website content stealing does happen frequently to many site owners (myself included) but as I pointed out, your attempts at blocking it are completely misguided as they will do absolutely nothing to stop what you are trying to stop from happening – for the reasons I’ve already mentioned…

The logic/reasoning in your solution is flawed – which is why I’m pointing it out – simply so that you can choose a better course of action.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by bluebearmedia.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by bluebearmedia.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by bluebearmedia.

Bluebear is trying to help, he’s got good infos.

What we’re talking about here seems to be site scraping. Difficult to prevent 100% but can be battled. If you’re just talking about someone “visits” your site then indeed, no way to really prevent that unless they used the exact same IP number every time, and had no ability or wish to change their IP number.

As for battling scrapers with Wordfence, that’s one of the primary uses for frequency blocking, as most scrapers are bots and they hit a lot of site pages, fast. If the scraping is being done manually by someone cutting and pasting out of your site, much more difficult to prevent. But there are ways to mitigate. Google “prevent site scraping” for several million hits on the subject.

MTN

Sorry guys, I’m not looking for a discussion if this is a correct way or not. For me, it worked perfectly for quite a long time. Now, with a faster server, it seems that the page load is faster than the IP block and I’m looking for a technical solution to improve that.

If you really have your heart set on IP blocking, then the way to do it is through DENY IP calls in .htaccess – that way, they don’t even hit your page before they’re blocked….

But as I already mentioned, blocking single IPs, is completely the wrong approach for your stated intention.

And burying your head in the sand when we point out the lack of feasibility of your approach won’t help you.

In short – “you’re doing it wrong.”

• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by bluebearmedia.

Hey, that’s something that could really help! I know the IP-ranges and after a quick search I figured out that it should be possible to add them to .htaccess.
Even if I do not agree with your point of view, thanks for the help!

The good thing about the factual information I gave you is that it is true regardless of whether you agree with/believe it, or not…

Peace out. ??