Blocking China IP range

I am getting fed up of continually deleting spambot registrations on my phpBB3 forum. I have turned the Captcha up onto as high as possible (almost to the point where even I can't read it!) yet still some are getting through. Turning up Captcha is therefore not a solution, and I have many visitors from Europe so I am reluctant to put in a "fill in the blank" sort of thing (phpBB3 only allows you to have one on at a time, and I can't be arsed modding the forum as I like the upgrades to be pain free), so I'm ruling that out too.

Would it be moral to find IP ranges for China and block them? My forum doesn't have any content which concerns China so I can't see it being a problem on that side...

Edited by Pipexer (Sun 02-May-10 20:54:46)

No reason why you should not block it - don't forget China blocks a lot of forums anyway.

Just wait until the get 10% Internet penetration in China - the we will really start to see problems.

If there is nothing about China I don't see it being a moral issue - I block Indian addresses from contact forms as was getting spammed from them

IP By country Ranges

I don't see any moral problem in limiting who can access your web site. In effect you already do this if (as I presume) it is published only in English and you don't provide versions in other languages.

Thanks for all your replies, I was just curious to see if there were any strong viewpoints that it would be unreasonable to block China (I am strongly opposed to any sort of government censorship by all means).

AEP: I thought that too, seeing as the content isn't available in Chinese then it makes it even more unlikely they would want to visit for informational reasons, along with the fact the info doesn't apply to them.

I'll block them

My host blocks China. Never had an issue with it - even when a friend was in China.

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

Thanks for all your replies, I was just curious to see if there were any strong viewpoints that it would be unreasonable to block China (I am strongly opposed to any sort of government censorship by all means).

AEP: I thought that too, seeing as the content isn't available in Chinese then it makes it even more unlikely they would want to visit for informational reasons, along with the fact the info doesn't apply to them.

I'll block them

For some micro stats 22/100 of our last hacked attempts(sshd) on our systems where from china.

I use the blocklists from this site; they're not perfect, but not bad
http://www.wizcrafts.net/htaccess-blocklists.html