Pascal

Maybe you could explain what does not work for you? Or perhaps open up a support ticket?

But for those plugins it’s relevant to update the robots.txt file. So you make your settings at that plugin and the plugin saves the relevant changes to that text file.

The text file however remains a text file where WordPress it not “started” when a search engine accesses that file. And if WordPress is not started iQ Block Country is not started either.

So yes, other plugins may save/read the robots.txt file but only when WordPress is accessed. If that specific file is served by your webserver in general PHP and thus WordPress won’t be started.

Hi,

If you exclude anything from caching it could work. The problem is that caching & Geo Blocking do not work well together unless you do the Geo Blocking at the cache level.

In the best case scenario countries or IP’s you want to block get served a page from cache and when visiting non cached pages they get blocked. This is due to the fact when pages are served from cache the iQ Block Country plugin does not get started and can’t do it’s job.

If the caching plugin however ignores the caching headers you risk the chance that the block message gets cached and everyone gets to see they are blocked even the countries that you did not block.

If you’re fine with blocked countries getting served the page from cache then you’re fine using the iQ Block Country plugin.

If you’re not you should disable either the cache or the Geo Blocking. Or search for another solution outside WordPress (for instance by using the Varnish software) where you can GeoBlock at a caching level.

Hi,

Unless your robots.txt is served by WordPress it won’t be blocked by iQ Block Country. Only pages/posts that are handled by WordPress will be checked if blocking is necessary.

Under normal circumstances robots.txt is a plain text file on your webhost and it will be served directly by the webserver (Apache, NGINX)

@rick111 I have not but it works on the same principle as iQ Block Country so it won’t get started if a page is cached and thus will not block the IP (range).

Plus that plugin hasn’t been updated since 2017

Blocking of more than just a couple of IP addresses via .htaccess is a very bad idea performance wise plus it won’t work for websites that uses anything else than Apache

Because you started the first question on our support system. We don’t answer the same questions that are asked on multiple platforms. It’s a free plugin and we don’t have an excessive amount of free time to be able to do that so we limit the answer to preferably our own platform if the question is also asked there.

Well thumb of rule is that anything that caches in some form interferes with the plugin as when a page is served from cache the plugin is not launched and thus cannot block.

A good caching solution does at least not cache the block page people get served, but some still do.

If you require both caching and Geo Blocking you must do that at the cache level. For instance varnish cache can do this but I believe it’s also included in a paid plan from Cloudflare.

Well you did get an answer a couple of days ago on your support ticket:

Pascal posted 12/13/24 20:52

I am not familiar at all with Google Tags but if you block the USA I can imagine this won’t work.

I can’t find however more information on how they interact with a website.

Could you perhaps send me a webserver logfile line where it accesses your website?

Using a caching plugin & Geo Blocking is not recommended:

Using this plugin with a caching plugin

Please note that many of the caching plugins are not compatible with this plugin. The nature of caching is that a dynamically build web page is cached into a static page.
If a visitor is blocked this plugin sends header data where it supplies info that the page should not be cached. Many plugins however disregard this info and cache the page or the redirect. Resulting in valid visitors receiving a message that they are blocked. This is not a malfunction of this plugin.

Disclaimer: No guarantees are made but after some light testing the following caching plugins seem to work: Comet Cache, WP Super Cache
Plugins that do NOT work: W3 Total Cache, Hyper cache, WPRocket

Warning: Caching & Geo Blocking do not work well together.

In the best case scenario countries or IP’s you want to block get served a page from cache and when visiting non cached pages they get blocked. This is due to the fact when pages are served from cache the iQ Block Country plugin does not get started and can’t do it’s job.

If the caching plugin however ignores the caching headers you risk the chance that the block message gets cached and everyone gets to see they are blocked even the countries that you did not block.

If you’re fine with blocked countries getting served the page from cache then you’re fine using the iQ Block Country plugin.

If you’re not you should disable either the cache or the Geo Blocking. Or search for another solution outside WordPress (for instance by using the Varnish software) where you can GeoBlock at a caching level.

Hi,

You’re probably using another plugin that also uses GeoIP class but which is outdated. So best is to urge them to upgrade the GeoIP2 class as well.

“This country is not permitted to visit the frontend of this website. This IP address is present in the frontend allow list.”

This on itself is not worrysome as it tells you your country is blocked but you still should be allowed in as you are in the allowed list.

Can you supply the info on the tools tab for me?

That is quite the accusation as I do not delete any comments. Nor do I actually have any permissions to delete any comment.

So that is quite the unprofessional response from you as you can’t backup your accusations.

If you don’t have any other plugins using the (old) GeoIP2 library you won’t have this error so unless you don’t have the exact same error message (other than a different path) post the error message.