FV Country Blocker

A simple & lean yet powerful plugin for blocking unwanted traffic from specific countries using MaxMind's IP database.

Description

FV Country Blocker is a simple & lean, yet strong way of blocking unwanted traffic from accessing your website based on their geographic location. By utilizing the MaxMind IP database, this plugin allows you to block visitors from specific countries, keeping your website safe from unwanted traffic.

Development Testing: To test in development or staging environments, you can simulate access from different countries by adding a query parameter [? or &]force_country_ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to the URL, replacing xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx with the IP address you want to test.

Installation

1. Install via the Add New Plugin wordpress interface, or upload the fv-country-blocker folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress.
3. Go to the plugin settings under Settings > FV Country Blocker to: a. configure which countries to block. b. set the MaxMind API key, or a custom path of the geolite2 country db. Bear in mind that this plugin will only download the DB regularly if the API key is provided, and the custom path is empty.

Frequently Asked Questions

How accurate is the country blocking?

FV Country Blocker relies on MaxMind's IP database, which claims it to be 99.8% accurate. However, false positives can still occur, so you should regularly monitor blocked traffic to ensure legitimate users aren't affected.

Will blocking certain countries affect my SEO?

Yes, blocking countries can impact SEO, especially if search engine bots are located in IP ranges that belong to the blocked country. Make sure to whitelist major search engines to avoid SEO issues.

How can I test the plugin on a staging or development site?

You can simulate a visitor's country by adding ?force_country_ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to the request URL. Replace xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx with the IP address you want to test from.

Screenshots

1. Settings Page – Easily block or allow traffic from specific countries.

Changelog

1.7.0

• Added "Exempt Paths" (Settings tab): requests to configured URL paths bypass all blocking (country, Tor and datacenter/VPN). Intended for transactional/account pages reached from email links (e.g. /manage-subscription/) that must be reachable from anywhere, including abroad or on filtered/proxied networks whose egress IPs are flagged as datacenter.
• Matching ignores the query string, is case- and trailing-slash-insensitive, and supports a trailing * wildcard for subtrees (e.g. /account/*).

1.6.0

• Added "Allow known crawlers" Bot Defense option: exempts genuine search-engine crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot, Yahoo Slurp, Applebot) from all blocking via forward-confirmed reverse DNS instead of a spoofable User-Agent. DNS runs only for crawler-claiming requests and is cached per IP.
• When enabled, plain Trusted User-Agent matches for those four crawlers are ignored (rDNS is authoritative), preventing UA-spoofing bypass.
• The "Add legitimate crawlers" button is now "Add social crawlers" and appends only DuckDuckBot, Twitterbot, facebookexternalhit (which don't publish reverse DNS).

1.0.0

• Initial release of the plugin.
• Country blocking based on MaxMind IP database.
• Added development testing feature using query parameters.

Upgrade Notice

1.0.0

Initial release. Ensure that you configure country blocking properly to avoid inadvertently blocking search engine bots or legitimate users.

License

This plugin is licensed under the GPLv2 or later. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html for more information.