Urgent: Attempting to block IP addresses causes an error

Question

It is currently impossible to block IP addresses on the main section. Pressing 'Block IP address' turns the following error:

This is happening for all of us, not just me. It is only happening on the main section -- the feature behaves as normal on Meta and RMT.

Being unable to block spam addresses is disconcerting. Please help D:

Comments

Does it show up when inspecting the js console for the page or is it only directed specially to the error log file (and therefore inaccessible by you)? :P

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Nope. Seems like it's an issue with Q2A which wouldn't be a result of the JS breaking.

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This is unresolved.

Answer 1

There is a limit to how many IP addresses can be blocked (specifically, all IPs are stored in a field with max 8000 characters). I've gone through and converted some common IPs to ranges e.g. 109.169.34.* so blocking works again for now.

But there's a chance we'll hit the limit again before too long. Unfortunately blocking IPs doesn't work for too long as spammers are able to switch to other IPs without much trouble. Many of the IPs we've blocked probably don't even need to be blocked as they have moved on to something else.

Comments

Is there no way to just increase the range we can block? How do larger sites deal with this kind of thing or do they just not bother usually?