What the title says, Cory is blocking countries due to misbehaved scrapers. We do a bit of this at work, blocking misbehaving countries when they flood our sites with traffic. There is very little reason that anyone should be visiting the website of a city unless they live in the city, maybe the city next door, and maybe the originating country of the city.

99% of the time when a site gets DDOSed by something it’s coming from somewhere outside the country. The leading countries are India, China and North Korea. Sure a single person, or a family could be researching a city, but that doesn’t explain the traffic floods.

Many of our customers use Cloudflare so we just block them at the Cloudflare level and call it a day. I go back after a few weeks and remove the block because some valid traffic is reasonable.

I had to take a line like that on my own site as well, block a bunch of offending scrapers and bots from countries. It sucks to stop regular people from visiting my site but I’ve already dealt with a bill of $5k in a month that should have been $50 and I don’t need another one.