Bot & Country Blocker

No. Visitors that claim to be Googlebot, Bingbot, Applebot, YandexBot or Baiduspider are checked by reverse and forward DNS and always allowed when they are real. Only impostors are blocked. Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended are robots.txt tokens, not crawlers; use the robots.txt option for them.

The admin panel is never checked, and every IP address that opens the admin panel is allowed on the storefront. If something still goes wrong, create the empty file var/kv_bot_country_blocker.off by FTP: the blocker stops at once.

A visitor that matches no rule costs a file include from OPcache and a few string checks; no database query. The country and network lookups use local databases and run only when a rule needs them. Blocked bots stop before CS-Cart builds the page, so heavy bot traffic actually lowers the server load.

No. Country rules work with the GeoLite2 country database that CS-Cart ships. For fresher data and network (ASN) rules, download DB-IP Lite (no account, CC BY 4.0) or MaxMind GeoLite2 (free account) on the Tools tab.

Yes. When a request comes from a Cloudflare edge address the add-on uses CF-Connecting-IP as the visitor address and CF-IPCountry as the country (also "T1" for Tor). The Tools tab builds Cloudflare WAF expressions from your rules, so you can stop the same bots at the edge too.

Yes, it is safe: it adds no markup to pages and its block pages are never cached. Pages served from the Varnish cache do not reach CS-Cart, so for those use the Cloudflare export or edge rules; search, cart, checkout, account pages, POST requests and cache misses are always checked. The add-on's own log, statistics and rate limit data never clear the page cache (version 1.0.1 and later).

A short page that runs a small calculation in the browser (about a second, no captcha, no third-party service). People pass and are not asked again for 24 hours; scripts and most bots cannot pass.

Add a Country rule with the action "Checkout only". Visitors from that country can browse; opening the checkout shows the checkout restriction page.

On Multi-Vendor the rules apply to the whole marketplace and only the administrator manages them; vendors see nothing. On CS-Cart Ultimate you can add rules for all storefronts ("All stores" mode) and per storefront, and the page texts and learning mode can differ per storefront.

Do I need a license for my staging site? No. Development and staging hosts are free, and subdomains of your licensed domain are included.

What happens when the update period ends? The add-on keeps working. You only stop receiving updates and support until you renew (50% of the current price).

What happens without a valid license? After the trial and grace periods the rules are no longer enforced: every rule only writes "would block" entries to the log, as in learning mode. Your rules, bot settings and log stay saved.

Does the license check slow the storefront down? No. The check runs once a day from the admin panel; the storefront only reads the stored result, and only when a rule matches.