"You have been banned from this forum...

[airlock]

...Please contact the webmaster or board administrator for more information."

Yeah, no, I didn't get banned. Bur e-m.com wont let me in when I use Opera, with the message "You have been banned from this forum. Please contact the webmaster or board administrator for more information." Maybe due to using the VPM built-in? VPM is the reason I got Opera, I hope that's not the case.

[Blue Hell]

Could be very well the case that someone used that VPN to do some bad stuff .. you know .. people do such stuff with once only email addresses.

I can understand your wish to use VPN, but oh boy .. yet another panodora's box .. the forum's defence against spam is based on IP addresses and email addresses (which, as being diposable, have become useless as a proxy) and I have no idea really as how to stop spam when VPN addresses can not be banned.

Anyway, if you give me the IP address I will unban it, but there is some risk for it to be banned again.

Meanwhile, when anyone has ideas about how to set up anti spam measures without using captchas on every post, without helping google to train their AI, but not needing to ban IP addresses, I'd be willing to try and implement something else than the current system.

Jan.

[airlock]

Hey Jan! The IP address gets scrambled, I don't think I have a workaround for that other than using Firefox. Hmm...

[mosc]

Could this have anything to do with the fact that at this time we aren't running SSL?

[Blue Hell]

I've no idea Howard, but I think we can test that.

Browsed a bit for opera VPN stuff .. all I found sofar was that it seems possible to set a different region for the VPN server in Opera .. this could be a good test I think to determine if it is https related or an electro-music IP address block instead.

Was actually looking for a list of VPN exit addresses to see of any of those are on the blocklist here - but did not find anything.

I'll install opera myself here to see what it does to me.

[Blue Hell]

I was banned too!

So at least its reproducable

Okay .. will try some stuff.

[Blue Hell]

Found the IP addresses involved and I think I unbanned them all, opera is working now for me with VPN enabled.

Edit: Let's see what will happen now; those bans were pretty recent - so it seems the Opera proxy (its not actually VPN at all they are using) is actively being used for making forum spam.

But why would one trust a Singapore based company with forwarding web requests Oh well, that's for users to decide I guess.

[Blue Hell]

BTW, in Opera, with the VPN option enabled, you can click on the VPN text in the top toolbar, and it will tell you what IP it is using (and you can select some), this seems to be the same IP that is actually forwarding the requests to the site to be visited.

[AlanP]

I use non-vpn Opera, and have no issues.