I have long had trouble from spammers from various parts of the world and determined that I would find a way to counter their activities. Well, experience being what it is, I found that security solutions often come in the form of multiple techniques, layered together in swatches to form barriers to most Internet pests.

The first of these techniques I will discuss today falls into the realm of using the I.P. address of a visitor to determine their rough geographic coordinates. The Internet, as it exists today, uses the IPV4 address space to map out regions of the planet into zones of internet address blocks that are allocated to regions and countries. If one looks to the page at  http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space, one can use the major octet (The starting number of a IP address) to get the roughest of ideas of where someone hails from.

Now, as a Pagan web site, I know my audience is mostly located in Western countries. Not *all* of the time, but most of the time. So, knowing from my logs who the worst offenders are in terms of systems abuse and such, usually the Chinese, Russian and South American countries as well as pretty much all of Indonesia, I can reasonably decide to block only on the major octet. Now this is the most primitive of screening methods, but if your requirements are met by screening out this way, then your .htaccess file can by modified to have "deny from 218" for example, which takes out an entire block of addresses from Asia.