Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me

We block China and Russia. DDOS attacks and other hack attempts went down by 95%.

We have no chinese users/customers so in theory this does not effect business at all. Also russia is sanctioned and our russian userbase does not actually live in russia, so blocking russia did not effect users at all.

Same here. It sucks. But it's just cost vs reward at some point.

How did you choose where to get the IP addresses to block? I guess I'm mostly asking where this problem (i.e. "get all IPs for country X") is on the scale from "obviously solved" to "hard and you need to play catch up constantly".

I did a quick search and found a few databases but none of them looks like the obvious winner.

Maxmind's GeoIP database is the industry standard, I believe. You can download a free version of it.

If your site is behind cloudflare, blocking/challenging by country is a built-in feature.

The common cloud platforms allow you to do geo-blocking.

I used CYMRU <https://www.team-cymru.com/ip-asn-mapping> to do the mapping for the post.

Which will ensure you never get customers from those countries. And so the circle closes ...

The regulatory burden of conducting business with countries like Russia or China is a critical factor that offhand comments like yours consistently overlook.

MaxMind is very common, IPInfo is also good. https://ipinfo.io/developers/database-download

If you want to test your IP blocks, we have servers on both China and Russia, we can try to take a screenshot from there to see what we get (free, no signup) https://testlocal.ly/

I used to run a forum that blocked IPs from outside Western Europe. I had no interest in users from beyond. It's not all about money.

It is funny how people immediately jump to conclusions, while I was merely pointing out an circular argument. People immediately think I am jumping to "aid one side". Shows much more about them than me, actually.

Nobody is jumping to any conclusions except you with this very comment. ;)

We dont plan to target China or mainland russia. Both are run by an oppressive regime, and that not something we want to be part of.

My conclusion is: People downvote, but why, when I am merely stating, that the reasoning is circular? Are they unable to get this simple fact? Or are they interpreting more into it, than there is? What is more likely? I choose to believe the second one.

You realize we can't see the scores on other people's posts, right? We have no idea whether or how many downvotes you received. You're talking to people who have no interest in doing business with these countries, so I don't understand how this could be circular reasoning.

Your offhand comment also doesn't make sense in the context of this subthread. The effort companies have to invest to do business with Russia and China is prohibitively high, and that's a completely valid concern. It's not that everyone universally hates or loves these countries. It's simply impractical for most businesses to navigate those markets.