Chinese IPs banned from the site

by **Tarot** on December 19th, 2011, 8:57 pm

Hello Mizaharians,

as a drastic measure to combat the influx of spammers, I have banned a huge range of IP addresses corresponding to pretty much all of mainland China. Unfortunately, these are not stupid bots that we can trick into helplessness. These are more likely indentured servants whose job is to register on sites and pave the way for actual bots. I was also loathe to rely on external spam-checking services.

I have tried connecting from several Chinese proxies and they were all blocked. Singapore and Hong Kong IPs should be safe. I've tried common IPs used by our players from those areas and they should all be working. Do let me know if you get a Forbidden message, though. We obviously don't want to lock out legitimate players. We never got an actual player from mainland China that I can think of, so the benefit should be greater than the loss.

Thank you for your understanding and be assured it was a necessary step. Spammers can use proxies, of course, but every single account we've deleted these past weeks was from Beijing and used no proxies.