dynamically block ips?

[Ronald Johnson]

Hi list,

I have a problem;
all my website code has been "copied"; those that took it has launched
it pretty much the same; just changed the texts and the color scheme.

That in itself is annoying, but the main problem is that they several
times per day scrape my site for the content
and copy that over to their website.

They do it from a dial up connection, so the ip changes reguarly,
however I have found ways to detect them (login names etc).

What I would like to do is to block their IP:s instantly, my thinking so far is:
detect them in my php scripts,
write their IP to nginx blocked-ips config file,
and tell nginx to reload the config files.

However, since my web scripts is not running as root, it cannot
restart nginx. (obviously)

The only solution I can come up with is to have a cron job that runs
every 5 minutes, check the datestamp on the blocked_ips file,
and if it was modified, it will tell nginx to reload the config file.
This is however sub-optimal, since I think that will give them enough
time window to get what they want from my site.

So, in short, my question:
any ideas how to trigger nginx to reload config files from a php script?
E.g. is there something that the nginx can check reguarly (the
existence of a file or something), and upon that take action to reload
its config files?

Any suggestions for a different solution is also much appreciated,

RJ