Hi there everyone,

All of my forums are getting hammered by junk requests, it seems to be a thing for everyone, at least judging by phpBB's support forums.

I'm currently handling it by blocking countries.(BR, CN, RU, VN, and SG), which is working to restore the forums to an operable status but I keep hitting geoplugin's cap and I'm unable to build my geoIP db quickly enough to handle the junk page requests.

Is there a service out there with a relatively high cap for this sort of information or am I just out of luck until I eek out the necessary info from geoplugin?

And just so I don't look like I'm holding forum participation over the head of people from these countries, none of these forums are active, they're test beds for me and the most active one has a total of 2 active members aside from me. That's why I'm not pursuing paid API access.

Even if it's dropping down to other free services in the event my PHP request doesn't end in a 200 status, I'd be happy with that, I just can't find any other services with free tiers. All the links in old SE topics are dead.

Thanks for your time!

EDIT: to clarify, this is the service I'm currently using.

$ipdat = @json_decode(file_get_contents("http://www.geoplugin.net/json.gp?ip=" . $viewing_user_ip));