@tyghebright @TheAbbotTrithemius @th3j35t3r Yep. It works.

When I ran a web forum for players of FFXIV, I ended up landing the same place J has -- there's countries whose IP spaces need to be blocked for the safety of actual users. I helped those who legitimately wanted to participate but were in the blocked countries to do so... But blocking those ranges cut our spam, trolls, and other awfulness by at least 90%.

@lenaoflune @tyghebright @TheAbbotTrithemius @th3j35t3r

Adding fuel for confirmation:

Ran a small webradio station + an asterisk exchange for a bit and dropping packets from entire IP ranges from X country including the ones J blocks cut down on background noise, backscatter, and as a result of that, fail2ban hammer swings by several orders of magnitude.

The benefits are too hard to ignore; The bans are incredibly effective.

@KAutumnrain @lenaoflune @tyghebright @TheAbbotTrithemius @th3j35t3r

Admit to being clueless about geopolitics w/o confessing to being clueless about geopolitics.

@clong
Counterpoint: Geopolitics or no, nullrouting certain geological areas that are typically abuse-heavy isn't necessarily insane. Doing so on a site like this certainly limits its reach, but lowers the noise floor.

@clong
Even if there were geopolitical merit to unblocking those areas, CoSo is a small, predominantly English-speaking mastodon fork.

Thus I ponder what your point is. Even if you focus on the bigger picture, abusive address ranges can and will get put on blocklists in order to protect the users actively using the site, if the threat model dictates it, which it almost certainly does.

@KAutumnrain it was a dig at the post in screenshots of the original post. I hope Britney Griner doesn’t have Russia on her itinerary anytime soon.

@clong
Ah... apologies 😅