I thought IP filtering was typically performed at the router level for speed
Not an expert. Yes, routers can do IP filtering at their level. But if China is sending web traffic MMM's way, it's going along Internet backbones and not going through routers at that point.
Thanks, mods, admins, MMM, etc. Quite fast for me currently.
Not an expert either but I think routers are integral to this whole Internet thing and can’t really be bypassed
At first I thought you were referring to Internet backbone sites (which I thought had routing devices that were called switches).
But after thinking about it some more, I guess you may be referring to the router between the MMM forum server and it's upstream Internet backbone site. You're right, that router can't be bypassed if you want to get to the MMM server.
My little home-quality cable modem / wifi router isn't powerful or configurable enough to handle the kind of problem being discussed here, but it's certainly conceivable that commercial-quality routers could.
ETA: Actually, it used to be that you could connect a computer directly to an Internet backbone site with a Ethernet network card and a hardcoded IP address (of course you should own that IP address, otherwise you can cause problems), so *technically* you didn't need a router to be on the Internet. I did it myself back in the mid-90's at a Silicon Valley-based Fortune 500 company. In limited cases this is probably true today - I bet there are some Google IT guys' computers set up that way just so then don't have to have a router slowing things down ;-). Obviously, though, the vast, vast majority of users these days are connected via routers, get dynamically assigned IP addresses, etc.