blocking ip address of spammers

[bassetlawblog]

not sure if this is the right place for this,  but having recently had a large amount of unwanted sign ups to our forum, we banned most of the persistent ones and made registration by approval only,

while this has almost totally cured the problem of unwanted spammers joining the forum, we are still getting 2 or 3 who are still trying to access the forum on a regular basis, (3 to 4 thousand attempts & counting)
while they are not getting full access, they are still able to view the board index etc , as guests,
and they are filling both the ban list logs and the forum error logs with their unsuccessful attempts,

after trawling through lots of posts here, i found one regarding the banning of ip addresses by using the .htaccess file method,
so i made the .htaccess file up using the 4 most persistent offenders ip's, and uploaded it to the server, but it seems that it has not stopped them getting access to the boards index,

this is a copy of the file i used, have i misssed something ? or do i need to do something else?

## USER IP BANNING
<Limit GET POST>
order allow,deny
deny from 46.17.100.208
deny from 62.189.102.229
deny from 118.97.224.2
deny from 195.162.68.27
allow from all
</Limit>

any help with this is most appreciated,
it is more annoying  rather than causing problems for the forum,
but we would still like to be able to control this if possible,

thanks in advance,

bassetlawblog

[rd]

Hi,

if you have Cpanel, you can ban bots easily by using the function of a Cpanel module. It should be there, I believe it's called IP deny and it makes the .htaccess for you.

[bassetlawblog]

Hi, Thanks for the reply,
we dont have cpanel, and after looking at it, it looks  far to technical for us at this point in time, 

with the .htaccess file method, we thought that as it says "deny" that is what it should do,
which is why we wondered if we had missed something out that the file needs to deny that ip address,

[kat]

Have a look at this:

http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1493

Reject registrations, automatically, for e-mail addresses ending in .ru, .gmail, .hotmail, et al.

[bassetlawblog]

Hi, thanks for that,
we had already looked at that mod, but as a similar feature was already available in the ban list, we did not use it,
and as the offending parties used fake email addresses anyhow, it sort of rendered it irrelevant,

we just needed something that would stop them even getting on to the forum in the first place,
as we said earlier, its more of a nuisance than a problem, as the ban logs and forum error logs will soon be bigger than the actual forum itself 


thanks.

[kat]

I have my error-logs disabled, for that very reason.

After all, you can always re-enable them, if needed.

[bassetlawblog]

now why didn't we think of that

thanks,