IP Bans

Post by **Matt K** » Mon Jul 25, 2022 9:17 am

Hi all,

One of my spam filters is being very aggressive (or more accurately, there is a LOT of spam coming from somewhere). I've had a few users report that they've been having issues on their home internet, but not their phones or vice versa. If you are experiencing this issue, can you send me your IP address via email or PM here (this isn't really private information and your ISP is invariably cycling through them, although I wouldn't necessarily recommend publishing it here).

I'll make sure that you get "unbanned" and it'll probably help tune the IP spam filter.

Post by **Matt K** » Mon Jul 25, 2022 9:24 am

Also include your username if you send it to me so I can investigate.

Post by **Matt K** » Mon Jul 25, 2022 9:53 am

A few minutes ago I made a change to the sensitivity of the captcha. If someone who was previously banned now can get in on the same device they were banned on, please report that here. Sorry for the inconvenience everyone.

glenp · Post by **glenp** » Mon Jul 25, 2022 9:55 am

Matt K wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 9:53 am A few minutes ago I made a change to the sensitivity of the captcha. If someone who was previously banned now can get in on the same device they were banned on, please report that here. Sorry for the inconvenience everyone.

Thanks Matt!

I am now able to get in from my phone, but on my home wifi, and I wasn’t able to before.

Post by **Matt K** » Mon Jul 25, 2022 10:00 am

That's excellent news. I just made it even less sensitive... we actually mostly care about registrations anyway so I think reducing the login threshold is pretty reasonble.

elmsandr · Post by **elmsandr** » Mon Jul 25, 2022 12:24 pm

Check the FB group post, there’s a number of folks that are locked out without a way to contact here, they get the same blockage trying to contact.

Cheers,
Andy

brassmedic · Post by **brassmedic** » Mon Jul 25, 2022 12:57 pm

Matt K wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 9:53 am A few minutes ago I made a change to the sensitivity of the captcha. If someone who was previously banned now can get in on the same device they were banned on, please report that here. Sorry for the inconvenience everyone.

10 minutes ago it said I was banned; now it's not.

glenp · Post by **glenp** » Mon Jul 25, 2022 1:33 pm

elmsandr wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 12:24 pm Check the FB group post, there’s a number of folks that are locked out without a way to contact here, they get the same blockage trying to contact.

Not sure why they don't have a way to contact the admins since the page that says you're banned has the admin's email address in it.

CalgaryTbone · Post by **CalgaryTbone** » Mon Jul 25, 2022 1:44 pm

brassmedic wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 12:57 pm
Matt K wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 9:53 am A few minutes ago I made a change to the sensitivity of the captcha. If someone who was previously banned now can get in on the same device they were banned on, please report that here. Sorry for the inconvenience everyone.
10 minutes ago it said I was banned; now it's not.

Same for me.

Jim Scott

Posaunus · Post by **Posaunus** » Mon Jul 25, 2022 1:46 pm

brassmedic wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 12:57 pm
Matt K wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 9:53 am A few minutes ago I made a change to the sensitivity of the captcha. If someone who was previously banned now can get in on the same device they were banned on, please report that here. Sorry for the inconvenience everyone.
10 minutes ago it said I was banned; now it's not.

Me too. I was banned on my mobile phone, due to "Spam" detection (?).
Rebooted the phone. All seems to be O.K. now on both phone and computer.

Thanks, Matt, for everything you do to keep this site safe and useful!

robcat2075 · Post by **robcat2075** » Mon Jul 25, 2022 1:56 pm

I got banned when I responded in a thread

EDIT: I could log in but if I responded to anything I got banned for "spammer". Now that is not happening.

Post by **Matt K** » Mon Jul 25, 2022 2:23 pm

Phew, okay so it looks like I won't have to take more drastic measures.

So here's what happened: We use reCaptcha to keep spammers from being able to register; however, there are (oddly) several other things that you can do with the addon, including: login, post, and report. I'm not sure why there's a problem with reporting but I guess other phpbb sites have the issue. At any rate, there is a scale of 0.0 to 1.0 that reCaptcha uses, with 1.0 being "definitely a human" and 0.0 being "definitely a bot". They recommend setting the threshold to .5. However, this morning the threshold banned like 25% of the userbase for logging in and some subset of those people were banned when they made a post (the ratios seem to be averaged or something). Which is why some users were able to log in on some devices, but not others, and others yet were able to log in but not post.

There are two providers of the reCapctha addon: Google and recaptcha.net. I had used the default: Google. That seemed to be the root cause of the issue and a combination of lowering the threshold to login, post, and report and switching to the recptcha.net as the recaptcha provider seems to have solved the issue (or at least I haven't heard of more reports).

I have cleaned up the [email protected] email account so that I don't get flooded with logging messages so feel free to use that as a means of communicating issues that may arise with "banning" if you can't get into the system here. (You can also use my "personal" email addresses too, whatever is convenient).

ArtL · Post by **ArtL** » Mon Jul 25, 2022 2:42 pm

My access has been restored. Thanks!

afugate · Post by **afugate** » Mon Jul 25, 2022 2:53 pm

I'm in now after being flagged as "banned" previously. Thanks, @Matt!
--Andy in OKC

mbtrombone · Post by **mbtrombone** » Mon Jul 25, 2022 3:28 pm

Just was able to login same phone and the ban is gone. Thanks for the hard work managing all this.

Matt

Post by **Matt K** » Mon Jul 25, 2022 3:33 pm

afugate wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 2:53 pm I'm in now after being flagged as "banned" previously. Thanks, @Matt!
--Andy in OKC

permanent may have been exaggerated by the software !

HawaiiTromboneGuy · Post by **HawaiiTromboneGuy** » Mon Jul 25, 2022 4:34 pm

All good now! Thanks!

ericrich · Post by **ericrich** » Tue Jul 26, 2022 9:54 am

Thanks, Matt…both for untangling this issue and for maintaining this excellent resource for us!
Eric

Pbth999 · Post by **Pbth999** » Tue Jul 26, 2022 12:45 pm

I’m back after previously being banned on my iPhone. Thank you

robcat2075 · Post by **robcat2075** » Thu Jul 28, 2022 8:26 am

When I got the ban I sent an email to the address the ban message suggested...

[email protected]

Today i get a notice saying that it is undeliverable so... something is wrong with that address.

Post by **Matt K** » Thu Jul 28, 2022 8:27 am

When I set the site up years ago I set that as the email but ended up not using the domain because of our email provider. It should be [email protected]. I did update that after the event as someone also pointed out to me. If you still see the webmaster email, let me know where you see if and I'll try to get that changed to the correct one.

robcat2075 · Post by **robcat2075** » Thu Jul 28, 2022 3:12 pm

That [email protected] email was the indicated contact on the page that told me I was banned for spamming.

I presume it is still like that, but you'd have to ban someone for spamming for them to see it.

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