I was banned

[kalle8]

I couldn't access to the forum last couple of months. I have to say thanks to casey1992 and "support" for helping me out, with ton of emailing and testing, all for a single user and his own IP problem....thanks.

[support]

You're welcome kalle.

 

Glad to see you back!

 

To explain to later readers, we have several IP range blocks in place to prevent traffic from web hosts from accessing the board. No bona-fide user accesses from a hosting; they access from an Internet Service Provider. 99% of spam is automated and 95% originates from web hostings (they use proxies) and some more than others.

 

These automated requests read & store topics for later use, attempt to post as guests and attempt to register to gain access, either to post or try and harvest email addresses. Being automated, they can do this very rapidly, even several times per second.

 

It is not about keeping the board spam free - although this does help - it is about ensuring genuine humans can gain as much of the server resources as possible. Without these bans, the board could be ground to a halt and you, the members, would suffer.

 

This issue was very strange because kalle's IPs were not actually present in any ban; if they had been, this would have been a very quick fix. It would appear that traffic was routed through a server belonging to a very well known spam host in France. Why that should be, I do not know yet.

 

Unfortunately, kalle fell foul of this and we had to get him to test the security measures until we could identify the problem one. It may have taken some time but once we were aware and able to work on it, the issue was resolved within 24 hours and 9 tests performed by kalle.