UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums Resources and Customizing Admin Zone Looking for best site firewall and CDN service

This is something new to me and has become a issue.

I am looking for one that supports UBB the best.
I also will be migrating the front pages to wordpress.
So one canidate Sucuri.
A little pricey at a starting price of $199.00 a year which is sitewide.
Another is wordpress plugings (wordfence,stackpath) but I am not sure they will cover wordpress and ubb as well.

So the bottom line question is , What are others using for UBB and does it serve the front end non UBB pages as well.

The only "support" UBB.threads needs is to be able to read the actual user IP address through the CDN, its why the /libs/fetch_ip.inc.php bits were added in 7.6 and continues to be updated through the current builds.

I can only vouch for CloudFlare; the free version is all most sites need... In fact, CloudFlare is what is in use on UBBDev, A Gardeners Forum, Scouters World, and UnderGroundNews (my main sites)

Does cloudflare allow geofence blocking by country?
What about the cdn performance?

I'm not a sales associate, do some groundwork on their site to compare features; especially with other providers, as I know there are plenty out there.

My plan is free, and I've blocked all of China and Singapore from UBBDev, to answer your question on geofencing; they also offer premium features which I cannot attest to as, again, I'm on their free plan.

And "is it fast", have you had any problems accessing any of my sites (other than when Groupee takes the UBBDev server offline for occasional maintenance)?

No I have not had issues.

But how did you block China and Singapore.
Was it in cloudflare with by country or did you get a list of ip's and paste them in.

A simple firewall rule, you can either enter the offending country names, ip addresses (that'd be quite the list), or asnumber.

There was talk that the free version now has a limit of 5 countries now and they only are challenges not blocks.
That is why I asked but your attachment shows block?
Maybe new signups have that limit.
Well I will try and see.

Thanks.

I guess it was all talk.
I have blocked 8 countries and even though some still slip in it is probably due to a vpn connection.
One thing I noticed with the free version it appears they do not cache dynamic pages such as the forum
Still have some settings left on the free version though.

Ruben, I sent you a PM. not about country blocking, but about bot blocking :cheers:

Got it thanks

CDNs are generally utilized to cache resources that're requested a lot, but rarely change, such as your images, JavaScript, and CSS files; caching of dynamic content such as that produced by a forum would likely cause a huge mess on a forum as posts would be cached for the full length set for the CDN cache (you wouldn't see updates to forum posts until the previous cached version of that page expired).

I imagine one could set a custom rule to achieve such a behavior, but that kind of caching isn't really good for a forum (or any site) with ever changing content (posts).

UBB.threads supports CDN's due to the work that went into 7.6's fetch_ip.inc.php file which produces a valid user IP address when a Proxy or CDN is masking the default PHP REMOTE_ADDR server variable (since a CDN or Proxy server is a server that sits in front of your production web server). There is Linux module that can be installed on some servers to produce correct user IP addresses (mod_cloudflare), but hosts don't generally modify their global server configurations due to a single user request (which is why the fetch_ip.inc.php file was created and modified; it's a fairly complex set of checks to produce a genuine user IP address with multiple permutations for multiple services).

We can provide some basic guidance to some services, but we're not Google or the CloudFlare support desk/FAQ so we're not qualified to provide support for 3rd party services that we don't own/operate; but there are millions of resources that one can find in Google such as:
Wikipedia - Cloudflare
Wikipedia - Cloudflare - Services
Cloudflare Support - How does CloudFlare Work
Mediawiki - Cloudflare Manual
KnownHost - The Ultimate Cloudflare Guide

I mentioned that tidbit for other users that may read this post contemplating using cloudflare.

I love it just for the fact of the firewall.