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Banned IP address message

Posted: Mon Jul 15, 2019 11:30 am
by Diomedea
Hello,
Over the weekend and on my mobile I received a message saying I was permanently blocked from the site, my ip address was banned.
Any ideas please?
And the op address must have been my mobile provider rather than my phone.
Thanks

Re: Strange message from the site

Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2019 3:37 pm
by Rapier
This can happen where you have a dynamic, rather than a static, ip address. Some ISPs do this as a matter of course and it may affect users when they're 'mobile' or access the site from multiple devices.

Due to huge numbers of spam registrations (even when using 'captcha' as a filter) we were getting on this site, we started to clamp down on rogue ip addresses and wildcard versions in those ranges, by checking against the online spam databases. We also now disallow new registrations using certain words and names commonly used by them, in addition to banning email suffixes from many countries / users that obviously have no interest in classic boating. Most of these spammers are registered in Russia, former Eastern Bloc countries, Latvia, etc, and China, Vietnam and Malaysia, so by banning them it generally doesn't affect our genuine users, but it's not unknown for me to be overzealous..

Our administrators / moderators are now happy and able to concentate on running the site rather than manually check / approve / decline, each of the 30+ junk registrations we used to get a day.

If anyone has a similar issue contact me and I'll look into it.