Thread

I’ve inherited an EE site for a newspaper that currently has over 22,000 blacklisted IP addresses.

I notice that most IP addresses in the blacklist end in a period (this is what would be required if entering the addresses directly into the .htaccess file), but not all.  Does this matter?  Should they be consistent?

Also, the .htaccess file contains multiple copies of all addresses in the blacklist.  Here is the result of searching for the block written by EE:

$ grep 'EE Spam' .htaccess
##EE Spam Block
##End EE Spam Block
##EE Spam Block
##End EE Spam Block
##EE Spam Block
##End EE Spam Block
##EE Spam Block
##End EE Spam Block
##EE Spam Block
##End EE Spam Block

What is the safest way of cleaning this up?

Most importantly, I tried to blacklist my own address and wrote the blacklist to the .htaccess file, but I can still access the site (my IP is not in the whitelist).  Should I not be prevented from viewing the site (let alone posting comments)?  Right now I’m allowed to view the entire site and post comments, even though my IP is blacklisted.

Thank you.

I decided to manually edit the .htaccess file and delete everything between the “EE Spam Block” comments, then re-save the blacklist from the EE control panel.

This re-wrote the “EE Spam Block” section in the .htaccess file.  This resulted in only one section.

However, I decided once again to add my own IP address to the blacklist and save it again.  Now I have two “EE Spam Block” sections in the .htaccess file.  Is this the way it’s supposed to work?  It seems that the .htaccess file will just keep growing and growing. . . .

I tested browsing the web site, and was not blocked by Apache, so the .htaccess blocking does not seem to work.  However, I was blocked from submitting a comment by EE.