Is it bad practice to block entire countries with a WAF?

[Pants]

Hey yall. Newby McPants here. I was setting up Wordfence and my country block list got reset. Long story short I went over to my AI assistant and thought I'd see if it would have a reccomendation for a block list. It told me that "it was very unethical" and "I can not give advice on blocking entire countries.." ... Is this just AI being weird, or is actually considered unethical to do this? Like bigoted in some way?

For instance, I have a site with no need for russia to be part of - it's just a small personal site. But I get probably 100 intrusion attempts a week (or more) from russia so I'd rather just block the entire country. Is this the wrong way to go about it? Should I just monitor on a smaller level? Is it bad for SEO? Thanks in advance.

 

[xsz]

I found this: https://www.searchenginejournal.com...countrys-traffic-dont-block-googlebot/402127/

Another thing to consider is using something like Cloudflare to prevent those intrusion attempts.

 

[slvrsteele]

Hey yall. Newby McPants here. I was setting up Wordfence and my country block list got reset. Long story short I went over to my AI assistant and thought I'd see if it would have a reccomendation for a block list. It told me that "it was very unethical" and "I can not give advice on blocking entire countries.." ... Is this just AI being weird, or is actually considered unethical to do this? Like bigoted in some way?

For instance, I have a site with no need for russia to be part of - it's just a small personal site. But I get probably 100 intrusion attempts a week (or more) from russia so I'd rather just block the entire country. Is this the wrong way to go about it? Should I just monitor on a smaller level? Is it bad for SEO? Thanks in advance.

It does depend on how you formulated your question to AI.
Either way country blocking can harm your website when it also blocks target audience. So if your target audience is from Russia for example then country blocking will reduce your traffic from there. No harm for SEO

I have seen websites targeting only audience from their own countries having everything else blocked.

 

[Pants]

Thanks. I am just going ahead and blocking a few countries that I've been having issues with for now. then once I have a bit more time to look at my setup I'll relax it a little bit.

 

[Tuton]

Thanks. I am just going ahead and blocking a few countries that I've been having issues with for now. then once I have a bit more time to look at my setup I'll relax it a little bit.

Best way is to setup CloudFlare WAF rules and challenge does country this will enforce them to go trough a captcha challenge if they are bot will get blocked if they are human they should pass the captcha.