Blog – Page 28 – The Renegade Coder

Disclaimer: the following article is a work of satire which will likely leave you disappointed if you're actually here to learn how to hide your website from you hometown. You've been warned. Have you every had content on the web that you wish you could more or less hide from a group of people, a city, or a network? While many services like social media have ways of controlling viewership, websites don't really have that level of control. Fortunately, there are some rudimentary solutions that can give you a small sense of security. Small Town Hate Thread Before I get into the fun part, let's take a moment to hate on small towns. After all, I grew up in a small town, and we're going to use it as the example for this article. The Place I grew up in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, a small town a couple hours north of Pittsburgh with a modest population of about 7,000. Of those 7,000 people, more than 92% of them are white. It probably comes as no surprise then that Morgan and I are both white as we're products of that cesspool. In addition to the limited population and the lackluster demographics, Edinboro has almost nothing to offer. Beyond Walmart and a handful of bars, the town has a university which doubles the town's population during the school year. Even if there were things to do in Edinboro, much of the time the town is buried in snow. I don't much care to get into the details, but the town sits in what the locals call the snow belt. As a result, whatever snow totals you see for Erie every year, you can pretty much double them for Edinboro. Fortunately for the locals, Erie is about 20 miles away, so it's normal for people to spend a lot of time in the city. I italicize city because Erie barely cracks 100,000 people, and that population has been on the steady decline. After all, what's going to be left when GE leaves? The People If the lack of entertainment and overabundance of snow aren't enough to sway you away from Edinboro, perhaps the people will. For 22 years, I lived in Edinboro. Today, I do not regularly speak to a single soul in that town except my parents and sister. Even when I visit, I find it hard to reconnect with people who live there. You may recall that I went on a bit of a rant about the week of the wedding party. Since the wedding party was open to anyone, I sent invites to as many friends as I could regardless of where they were living. Here's an abbreviated list of places that people traveled from: Rivington, NJMilwaukee, WIRochester, NYCincinnati, OHCleveland, OH You know who didn't show up? Quite a few people, including family, who lived right down the road. Let's not forget that Morgan and I—the party hosts—traveled from Atlanta, GA. Like, for real? You couldn't make it 2 miles down the road? But, I'm not bitter from that one event. To be honest, I'm not really surprised. Edinboro is just one big sinkhole. If you stay, you get caught up in alcohol and drugs just to pass the time. If you leave, you get to actually have a life. Naturally, I chose the latter. The Consensus Even with all the disdain I have for Edinboro, I often wonder if my opinion of small town life is normal. As it turns out, it totally is. Just take a look at a few of these articles and threads: Living in a small town SUCKS!What is it like living in a small town?I hate small towns Obviously, I have a bit of confirmation bias invested in this opinion, so you don't have to take my word for it. After all, I love the countryside. I like green pastures and animals, and I love living the simple life. The problem is life really isn't that simple in a small town. As you'll find in many of the articles and threads above, small town life really does suck. Perhaps the following quote by Reddit user Middleman79 best sums it up: People know what my fart smells like before its left my arse, and if they don't, they'll make it up. I find this quote particularly painful as it's so true. In fact, this issue of privacy never really goes away thanks to modern technology. Now, all my small town friends and family can obsessively stalk me while I'm trying to live my life. Forget coming home because you'll be hearing about all the things you've been doing wrong with your life. Favorite Quotes I couldn't possibly finish tearing up small towns without a fun little section on some of my favorite pithy quotes: In my experience everyone works together to make you try to kill yourself. We go to Walmart...a lot. I'd go as far as to say no normal person likes living in a small town. The shitty people can't do anything besides judge others and gossip. If you hate your small town, you may be the only sane one left in it. Everyone has the maturity level of a high school student. A common saying is "small town, big hell..." What I am not particularly fond of is the nosy judgemental nature of the locals and their gruff mindset, which is just barely tolerable but very annoying. Well, aside from the nepotism, despotism, parochialism, and lingering racism, and the obnoxious harassing idiots driving people away, I can honestly say: it could be worse. To be honest, I could probably continue posting quotes for hours, but I think these are plenty. People Hate Success Recently, I've attracted a lot of negative attention to my blog from my hometown. This is quite frustrating because I've been digging away at this for almost two years now, and not one person from back home has even acknowledged that I exist. Clearly, support is not something the locals are capable of—at least not without holding it over your head for the rest of your life. As a result, you can probably imagine why I'd like to hide my content from them. After all, they don't deserve to see it. At any rate, some of the locals have found some of my content offensive to them, and they've decided to voice their dissent through comments. Usually, I'll read what they have to say and respond appropriately. Unfortunately, many of these people have left such heinous comments that I've been forced to categorize it as spam. In fact, some of these comments are borderline bullying. Of course, in their miniature fits of rage, they've forgotten that I can track their behavior through the Wordfence plugin. In fact, I've isolated a handful of IP addresses from Edinboro that routinely browse my website at all hours of the day. One in particular has been rapidly scanning articles, and it's been murdering some of my site's metrics. As a result, I decided to IP ban that specific user. IP Banning Unfortunately, if you know anything about networks, then you know that this is a brute force solution. If the victims cycle power to their modem, there's a chance that they'll have a new IP address that they can use to browse the site. Even if the IP ban sticks, they can always disconnect their phones from the WiFi and continue browsing. I don't even have to get into the use of proxies or VPNs. There are just countless ways to get around an IP ban. That said, I still thought the idea was kind of funny, so I wanted to give it a shot. Fortunately, other people have been in interested in doing just this: Block A City From Visiting my WebsiteBlocking a City or Region from website After digging into a few of these articles, I decided to take a stab at it myself. Banning Individuals As someone who doesn't know a lot about networks, I figured the easiest thing to do would be to permanently ban Edinboro IP addresses as they used the site, so that's what I did. Before long, I noticed a handful of IP addresses that were obsessively stalking my website. Naturally, they made easy targets for my IP ban. While this worked for a short time, I started to wonder what would happens if those IP addresses moved out of Edinboro. Would I potentially be blocking innocent people? Also, what happens when the list of IP addresses becomes impossible to maintain? It wasn't long before I decided to look for an alternative solution. Banning Regions As an alternative, I thought to ban a region of IP addresses. This solution would be ideal as we'd only ever need to change the range of IP addresses when the region of IP addresses change. Unfortunately, this is an impossible task. In order to really find all of the IP addresses for a specific region like Edinboro, I'd have to know all the available ISPs there. From there, I'd need to know how they allocate their IP addresses. If they do so by region, I'm good. Otherwise, I'm stuck. Banning Hostnames Despite having rather high confidence that Edinboro only has one ISP, Zoom Internet, I decided not to try to hunt down their list of IP addresses. Instead, I thought it might be an even better idea to ban the entire hostname. The problem with this solution is that the ISP could grow, move, or go out of business. If any of these happened, I'd be stuck at square one; I needed a long term solution. Create a Membership Site After fiddling with IP addresses and hostnames for quite some time, I realized that they offer no clean solution. From there, I looked into MAC addresses. I thought maybe if I could identify hardware, I could ban those devices individually. While never finding a way to do this, I did find out that spoofing a MAC address is apparently pretty easy, so I'd be wasting my time anyway. That's when I came up with an ingenious solution: hide all the content I don't want people from my hometown to see behind a membership. That way, all the locals will be forced to give up some of their information which means they'll be less likely to spread hate on my site. To make matters even better, I can hide high ticket content behind a pay wall which is exactly what I did. In fact, this article is one of those high ticket items. If I wanted a local to see this article, I wouldn't have spent half of my time making fun of them. I enjoy this solution the most because I have a lot more control. If a user becomes a problem, I can deactivate their account. At the same time, I'm gaining valuable assets like emails to build my list. Now, I send out a weekly Friday update with the latest posts from the previous week. How cool is that? While I've got you here, let's talk. Do you like the new membership system? Do you think you're getting value out of it? If not, what can I do better?