Anyone know any ranges on this sort of thing? I want the spam bots to stop, but I don't want to block any legitimate user on accident.

Nothing but spam coming from the desolate country. I think every website should IP Ban Russia.

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Mark
Marketing Assistant / Webmaster
Coldwell Banker
Southlake, TX
Dallas Fort Worth Luxury Homes | Colleyville Texas Luxury Homes | Southlake Texas Luxury Homes

What types of spam bots you got bothering you? The ones that go around and fill in your contact forms? If it's your contact forms, you'll want to look into some strong validation for them. There are a few tricks left that prevent them from filling in the forms, some are fancy with CSS and javascript, or a simple captcha on the forms sometimes helps alot with the spam.

I don't think banning Russian IP's would eliminate the spam problem., I'm sure there are spammers all over the world. Anyway. I did find a few good list of IP addresses using a Google search for "Russian IP" if you wanted to ban a bunch of IP addresses you could do it in a .htaccess file.

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Aaron
Programming

Real Estate Webmasters

It's not just the forms. There are bots that go around visiting dead or non existent links. There are also these bots that are trying to hack me or something. The basically are trying to access install directories that do not even exist.

The thing about form validation is I am afraid no one will use them if it is too much effort. I don't want to do anything that requires Javascript. I was under the impression that nothing could fully defeat spam bots.

I will Google what you said. I already have my .htaccess blocking a few ips and some random bots I found on my site.

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Mark
Marketing Assistant / Webmaster
Coldwell Banker
Southlake, TX
Dallas Fort Worth Luxury Homes | Colleyville Texas Luxury Homes | Southlake Texas Luxury Homes

Yeah. I found some giant lists of IP addresses that were suppose to be from all over the world. Might be easier to just deny all , and only allow IP's within North America.

Either way, it'll be a bit of work to keep blocking them, and they may just end up going through proxies in the US, and they are back spamming you.

So pretty much the internet is full of spam as I'm sure you know....

The spam bots are not easy to beat, but there are ways to reduce the chances of them using your contact forms to spam without causing any issues for your users ( leads ) , or just filling in a bunch of forms on your site - why they do that I'll never know.

Good Luck!

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Aaron
Programming

Real Estate Webmasters