Some time back I wrote the Forum Auth by Post Count MOD for phpBB2. I had to write it because so many people were using an “auto-group” MOD of some kind, and using it to grant permissions to view or post in specific forums. The general idea is good. In my opinion, the implementation is bad and can have a substantial negative impact on your board.

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For various reasons over the past year or so I have been wondering what is the best way to block access to my server. I have used .htaccess files in the past, but they have two drawbacks. First, they have to be processed by apache everytime someone requests a page. Second, they have to be set up for every domain. It would be much more efficient to drop traffic before it even gets to apache.

That is what the iptables command does, and I think I finally got it figured out.

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