Sciencemadness Discussion Board

WiFi banned?

z13123 - 24-9-2014 at 14:23

My home WiFi ip seems to be banned or something. I read about this happening to others, but I waited a day and I'm getting 403 you don't have access to server. So I'm just using my phone to write this up on a data network atm.


[Edited on 24-9-2014 by z13123]

Polverone - 24-9-2014 at 14:35

It is possible for legitimate members to sometimes be blocked by accident. There is a script that looks for IP addresses with too many simultaneous open connections to the site and temporarily bans them. This is to block people who are running spidering/archiving systems without setting reasonable rate limits. It sometimes triggers also if people save a browser session with a lot of open Sciencemadness tabs, then restore the browser session. Some browsers will try to reload all the tabs at once, causing a big spike in the number of open connections.

It is also possible, though it would be rarer, for you to get a dynamically assigned IP address that has been recently used by a spammer and is thus blocked. Are you outside North America or Western Europe? Most spam attacks seem to originate elsewhere, so your chances of being coincidentally IP-banned are higher if you are in other regions.

IP bans used to expire once a day, but that let spammers come back too quickly. They are currently configured to reset every 7 days. If you can send me your home IP address in a private message I can manually unblock it.

chemrox - 24-9-2014 at 15:28

Have you checked your internet connection? Are you running win-doze?

Polverone - 24-9-2014 at 16:24

His internet connection is fine. If he's getting a 403 error from the server he is reaching the server, the server just doesn't like his IP address.

The Windows question is a decent one. Are you sure that there is no malware running on your computer? Some spam posted here is delivered by humans but more is from malware bot farms. I can tell because there's some banned IP addresses from residential providers that keep mindlessly trying to log in here 3 times per second, even though they are getting a 403 forbidden error every time.

Edit: z13123, I looked up your registration IP address. It was in the current banned list though you didn't have any banned posts or profiles. I manually unblocked it.

[Edited on 9-25-2014 by Polverone]

z13123 - 24-9-2014 at 17:14

Huh I was about to reply saying everything was fine, but when I clicked post reply, it gave a 403 again and everything stopped working. I do have a firewall and anti-virus so I do not believe there is malware on my computer. I do block ads and use noscript, but I don't feel like that would affect anything.

The initial block was probably triggered by my session manager loading everything at once, but it's strange because this time I only tried refreshing the page.

edit: all is good now, thanks
[Edited on 25-9-2014 by z13123]

[Edited on 25-9-2014 by z13123]