I’ve just blocked a bunch of IP addresses.

Over the last few months, I’ve noticed a fairly odd pattern in my referrer listing. Every morning (my time), I seem to get a request that appears to originate from http://nitrocandy.com. Yesterday I decided to do something about it. I checked the extended logs and found that that particular request comes from a set of IP addresses beginning with 124.115.0.*. According to this post and, consistent with my own logs, this is a gateway (or similar) in China. I’m also not the only one who is a little upset about it. Bots Vs. Browsers tells me that at least one block of this IP range belongs to the Soso search engine, whose spider is presumably responsible for these hits. The rest of the IP block is also owned by Chinanet Shanxi province.

The problem is that the bot is insistent, doesn’t obey robots.txt, seems indiscriminant and, I think, doesn’t honestly report its referrer. So I’ve followed the lead on this site and blocked the following ranges:

220.181.61.
124.115.0.
208.36.144.
124.115.4.
220.181.32.26
58.61.164.
220.108.7.
220.181.
221.194.
202.108.7.

I realise this may block one or two legitimate readers but I can’t see any other way of doing it.