Why would you want to block certain IPs?
Customer service agents may experience a lot of abuse from random callers at times. Some people just enjoy wasting other people's time. Probably they find it entertaining. For the companies, however, it's a waste of time and resource to answer such chats. So you may find yourself in need of blocking some annoying callers from time to time. Here's when the IP blocking feature will come in handy.
How to enable chat access restriction by IP
- Open Account Settings / Chat Access Restrictions page in your Control Panel.
- Enter the IP address you would like to block.
- Add a description (optional) to let your colleagues know why this IP has been blocked
- Click "Add" button
- Repeat the same with as many IPs addresses as you need to be blocked
- Click "Save" at the bottom of the page to save the changes.
Please note that if a visitor uses a VPN service or has a dynamic IP, you may still not be able to block those callers, even if you recognize it is the same person contacting you in chat. In such cases, we recommend to just ignore those callers and close out their chats without accepting them.
How to block the whole subnet
Instead of blocking a single IP, you can also block a whole subnet by using a subnet mask slash notation.
You can read more details on the subnet mask configuration here.
You can also limit access to your chat from certain websites or block access by country.