[Forrest]

Originally Posted by Ilgaz

There is hardly anyone sitting and spamming forums manually anymore.

Actually, with a lot of techniques for blocking bots, manual spamming is on the rise again.

There are organised spam bots , infected machines dubbed as "zombies" and lets say if 100 turkish infected machines spamming this forum, 1 guy being Omni customer (me) will get effected.

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IP (block) ban, if not feed from an open, reasonable RBL such as open proxy list, it is extremely risky and may cause harm to Omni groups image forever.

Not very risky at all. Many sites do it without any repercussions. Every major ecommerce site I've ever worked on has blocked users based on IP range to prevent problems from occurring with their existing customer base as well as their target customer base.

I maintain a movie actors official site and I had horrible spam from certain countries. Let me ban these blocks? What did the real fan of him do to be treated like that? Even if it is single person?

I think that shows where you and I disagree the most. One can't please everyone all the time. It's just not possible. MS products are a prime example of design & marketing by committee. For the OG, it should be somewhat clear cut on if blocking IP ranges will work for them. Look at the IPs of the spammers, see if they are in related ranges, then see if any of their known customer base is within that range or have addresses in that region. Then take into account their future marketing plans.

If I didn't know Omni Group and I wasn't registered, if I went to forums wondering about products and introduced a page accusing my IP block of spamming, I would say "racists" and move along. Sorry to speak too open but there is no better way to explain the horrible risk of IP block banning.

I know I initially gave an example of blocking based on a country, but I've also said just block ranges. I agree that blocking by country can be risky. For the one site that I know did that, they had zero customers from that country and that country was not at all part of their target market. The OG has a bigger market, so that doesn't exactly apply.

Still, I don't see how blocking based on IP could be considered "racist." AFAIK, no race is born with an IP address.

Last year, Gizmo project which is opensource,standards based telephony application got hit by horrible accusations since their genius company banned certain countries from calling because of fraud. The project was doomed. The download numbers dropped significantly.

I don't know anything about the project, but after doing some research it doesn't seem like the project was "doomed" at all. There was an update a couple weeks ago. I found one article from yesterday calling it one of the top five VOIP players. If their move made such a big splash, it probably would have ended up in their wikipedia entry.

And if they were being hit with fraudulent actions from specific countries, I'm not surprised they blocked them. I can't access my bank account from certain countries. Do I think that's a bad thing? Not at all, I'm glad they block access.