China National Flag

I don’t know what Google is doing with their threats to exclude China from it’s circle of friends, but I can tell you that I’ve a strong ban going on the entire countries IP address assignments for a completely different reason.
It seems the previous owner of danslife.net had hosted some really popular music files from really popular musicians in China (or wherever).  So much so that I still receive nearly 300 unique requests a day for music files that don’t exists.  These visits really throw off the daily stats for actual visitors.  To give you an idea of how many search engine results come up from the old site click this link.  The first four or five listings are good, then pages and pages and pages of music listings.

Tired of traffic stats I have to throw out, I decided to take affirmative action.  I’ve obtained a list of almost all the IP addresses assigned to internet providers in China.  I created a .htaccess file for the Apache web-server running my site.  I then added all the addresses to the allow/deny routine and bam.  97% of the traffic just plain denied!  There are some addressed that keep sneaking through and I will keep adding them to the list as I catch them.

For now, I know its working and I’ll fine tune it as I get time.  You can get a rough idea of traffic and visitors to the site by visiting the Whos Visiting link in the menu bar up top.