> I know some actual users get blocked. But the amount of spam we get without it, the amount of bot traffic simply overwhelming the server... It is just too much.
One of the core tenets of system design is Availability. If your service is not available - if your forms are blocking legitimate users - then why are you pretending to have a form submission feature at all? Just to frustrate users?
The service won't be available to anybody because of overwhelming unwanted traffic. Now it's available for most potential users. You're speaking econ 101 when everyone else has played out iterated prisoner's dilemmas.
Turns out that people have a tolerance for a non-zero amount of work, but still have a limit.
Suggesting "turn off your website" is does not account for the desire to also provide some access.
Treat people who host content as humans, just as we must treat users as humans. There are tradeoffs, suggesting "shut down your website unless you provide access everywhere" is worse on all fronts for everyone.
Maybe, maybe not.
If block-heavy websites shut down entirely, we lose some content, but other content moves to block-minimal sites and the average user might be able to access more.
Also if there's no blocking crutch, and people get pushed into shutdown and are mad about it, they might fight harder for anti-spam technology and legal enforcement, which could improve the situation.
Because those are the only two countries that we've ever in the life of our business, had a legitimate order from.
It prevents the majority of credit card testing, but it is tempting to apply it to the whole site to reduce traffic and server load.
If you are getting blocked by CloudFlare, you are most likely not our demographic.
And there's always email address given in form submission, so a couple of users (like less than 5), emailed about the block and I added rules for each of them.
Better than taking down the whole thing because of bots scraping the site 5x more rate than humans.
At least for China, I imagine most of the real humans might use a VPN anyway
What about before I start "fixing" anything, you throw away everything you have "made in China" and stop buying Chinese goods.
Oh, but wait, you cannot do it because walking naked in the street is illegal.
No, you enjoy cheap Chinese stuff to the degree that your country lost all its manufacturing.
I know some actual users get blocked. But the amount of spam we get without it, the amount of bot traffic simply overwhelming the server... It is just too much.
Recently I also hard blocked all IPs from china Singapore India Pakistan Russia and whole of africa. Do I want to do it? No. But the amount of bot traffic and corresponding spam is a bigger problem :(