BillFitzmaurice.info

Hello fellow builders,

I seem to have an issue with accessing this forum from my home Internet connection.

I am getting the "You have been permanently banned from this board" message.

no idea why, I am accessing this from my mobile at the moment. Anyone have an idea why this might be?

IPs that are known sources of spam attacks are banned. You can use this to identify your IP:

http://en.utrace.de/

And these to see if that IP has been identified as a spam source:

http://www.stopforumspam.com/search
https://cleantalk.org/blacklists/

Most banned IPs are Asian and Eastern European. Sometimes Australian IPs get caught up in the mix because they're often routed through Asia.

The IP you originally registered from is 139.218.246.65, which is not banned. If you changed providers it may have been to one that is banned.

Hi Bill,

Thanks for the reply. Searching my new ip, looks like it has been reported 969 times. I am with a new ISP and they do not have static ip's, so I will just have to restart the modem connection a few times and hope I get a new one assigned.



Cheers.

spiltmidi wrote:I will just have to restart the modem connection a few times and hope I get a new one assigned.

That may not help. Just as you can get a different IP final digit set every time you log on so do spammers, so what gets banned is usually the entire range of IPs associated with that provider. I wish it wasn't so, but I know from experience that if we didn't ban spam domains that we'd be hit with at least a hundred spam registrations every day. As it is we get hit on average five times a day from domains that weren't already banned. You can't even avoid it with spam filters. They keep out bots, but nowadays the main source of spam isn't bots, it's real people who are paid to infiltrate forums. Ultimately it's the providers who are at fault. Most make sure that they keep spammers from using their systems, but many simply don't care, so long as the spammers pay their monthly bill.

+1 what Bill is saying, I am a moderator on 2 forums and the spammers hit them 24 hours a day. No matter what I do, they always find ways to make accounts and post their garbage. It really doesn't even help to ban entire ranges of IP addresses, they just use another range. I have found that setting the forum permissions so that new posters first few post have to be moderator approved helps but the forum owners don't like that because it means that someone with a legitimate emergency trying to get help wind up not being seen in time and then they lose a customer. I wish that the NSA and CIA could find and disable the spammers but no, all they want to do is read our personal messages.

rr97guy wrote: I have found that setting the forum permissions so that new posters first few post have to be moderator approved helps but the forum owners don't like that because it means that someone with a legitimate emergency trying to get help wind up not being seen in time and then they lose a customer.

That's why we don't use automatic registration activation. Every IP, username and email address is run through the spammer databases before they are activated. We still get the occasional spammer that slips past us, but only two or three a year, and they get booted within at most a few hours after posting their crap.

Thanks Bill and rr97guy for the information.

Will just have to see how I go. I have another connection on my work laptop through the mobile network, so I will just have to use that for now. It had been working fine up untill last night, so I have no idea why it would have changed unless my connection refreshed and got assigned this IP.

Thanks again.

Your last eighteen posts have originated from seven different domains. All are Australian, I don't recognize any as being banned. Sometimes you can get routed through an Asian domain which is banned. Our software only sees the last IP that it went through. What is the IP that you traced?

HI Bill,

The ip that I traced was 121.223.0.225.

This thread I have been using my mobile, so the ip will be different.

Before this thread, the forum had been working fine on my home connection.

Thanks for the help.

Regards,
Evan

There doesn't appear to be any recent spam activity from that specific IP, so I'll clear it from the ban list.

Thanks Bill,

All working again now.

Much better being able to check the forum on the laptop.

Thanks again.