pop yes Of course you are right. But now 'my problem' is more acute! The server reports being out of bandwidth. I'm sure that is not due to legitimate GB users. I suspect, but can't prove, that a country level block would really help. It would be great to have access to the country of users in the @ALL@ group so I could present non GB users with a minimalist page via the ACL policy. I did make my own rough and ready PHP function, but I'm not up to integrating this with Dokuwiki. All the function relied on was calling an external service library to do the discrimination.
$access_token = 'xxxx...';
require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
use ipinfo\ipinfo\IPinfo;
$client = new IPinfo($access_token);
$details = $client->getDetails($ip_address);
echo $ip_address.'<br>';
Which should remove our burden of keeping the IP database up to date. But how to integrate this into an .htaccess file or the Wiki itself eludes me.