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

We solved a lot of our problems by blocking all Chinese ASNs. Admittedly, not the friendliest solution, but there were so many issues originating from Chinese clients that it was easier to just ban the entire country.

It's not like we can capitalize on commerce in China anyway, so I think it's a fairly pragmatic approach.

Why stop there? Just block all non-US IPs!

If it works for my health insurance company, essentially all streaming services (including not even being able to cancel service from abroad), and many banks, it’ll work for you as well.

Surely bad actors wouldn’t use VPNs or botnets, and your customers never travel abroad?

Don't care, works fine for us.

And that's perfectly fine. Nothing is completely bulletproof anyway. If you manage to get rid of 90% of the problem then that's a good thing.

Okay, but this causes me about 90% of my major annoyances. Seriously. It’s almost always these stupid country restrictions.

I was in UK. I wanted to buy a movie ticket there. Fuck me, because I have an Austrian ip address, because modern mobile backends pass your traffic through your home mobile operator. So I tried to use a VPN. Fuck me, VPN endpoints are blocked also.

I wanted to buy a Belgian train ticket still from home. Cloudflare fuck me, because I’m too suspicious as a foreigner. It broke their whole API access, which was used by their site.

I wanted to order something while I was in America at my friend’s place. Fuck me of course. Not just my IP was problematic, but my phone number too. And of course my bank card… and I just wanted to order a pizza.

The most annoying is when your fucking app is restricted to your stupid country, and I should use it because your app is a public transport app. Lovely.

And of course, there was that time when I moved to an other country… pointless country restrictions everywhere… they really helped.

I remember the times when the saying was that the checkout process should be as frictionless as possible. That sentiment is long gone.

> I wanted to order something while I was in America at my friend’s place. Fuck me of course. Not just my IP was problematic, but my phone number too.

Your mobile provider was routing you through Austria while in the US?

Yes, newer backends for 4G and 5G networks work exactly that way.