Why am I blacklisted on this forum?

do you perhaps use a vpn? if so and the TCF thinks you are accessing it from another country, it might be blocking you for that reason.

 

You may want to post in: Forum Operations Center

Greater likelyhood an admin will see it there.

 

The problem is VPNs are abused a lot by people with more nefarious intents. Like Tor exit nodes, their anonymity provides excellent cover for those wanting to practice or break into websites and their IPs get blacklisted by many security firewalls because many attacks originate from them.

So it's not you, but it's everyone else using your VPN service that are causing problems. It's like the crack house in the neighborhood - everyone knows what's going on and you're going to assume everyone going into or out of the place isn't just living there because rent is cheap.

Your options would including finding another VPN provider (not likely to work because of same reason - everyone else has abused the IPs so they're blacklisted), set up your own VPN service (they exist and often guarantee your own IP, thus giving you privacy as well as being in the clear).

Doesn't even matter if the VPN provider sets up a new server - the abusers will use it and the IP will be blacklisted within hours.

 

You're missing the point that your account is still active, if they were "out to get you" your account would be disabled.
What's happened is the IP address listed is most likely in a block of IPs flagged by a shared blacklist.

 

It sounds like you might not fully understand how blacklists work and are distributed, it's the same for how email blacklists work, sometimes a few bad apples can result in a whole domain being unable to have their emails received by others because of abuse. The answer is don't use services that are regularly blacklisted because of abuse from their clients. Blacklists don't just stop one IP, they're set for a fairly large block or range since the abuse comes from multiple clients.

While home ISP connections don't have static IPs, in most cases the way the DHCP scopes are setup if you use a connection regularly and don't power cycle your cable modem, you can have the same IP address for years in your home due to the way leases and the renewal process works.

It was pointed out above that your VPN may very well have been the cause of the issue, sometimes it's a false positive, some times it's a bad actor using it and you fall victim from what I described in the paragraph above.

 

Perhaps it's your handle "Johnny Danger"? Try "Johnny Angel".

Kidding aside...
Set your vpn to another city and try that.
Or, if your vpn offers split tunneling and you use chrome (for example), try using a different browser which is assigned to be outside the vpn tunnel.
Or, turn off your vpn when accessing TCF.
Or use Tapatalk on your smart phone (with vpn off).

Which vpn provider do you use?

 

This very thing has happened to me multiple times on this site over the past few years and I never use a VPN (and I've switched ISPs, routers and modems during that time period too). When it happens, I can usually still post responses on a different thread here but, for whatever reason, I cannot do so on the particular thread where this message popped up, even if I switch to a different browser. Very weird. It is a persistent problem that the site admins should look into, though.

 

Your issue is different than the one posted above where the IP address was blocked due to blacklisting. The typical one that you are seeing is where there is something in the reply or post that the website firewall believes to be an attack. When I've gotten that error, there's usually something in a quoted reply that it believes is a SQL injection attack.

Scott

 

Hmm, maybe so. Although I can't imagine what is being interpreted as a possible attack. If another user was allowed to post it originally, why would my quote of their post trigger the system? Odd...

 

I assume it's the extra characters that get added as part of the quoting process that trigger it from what I've seen. (like these QUOTE="NashGuy, post: 12231115, member: 301119"]).

Scott

 

Scott is correct, as I discovered not too long ago.

I had the same issue with a post I had written and I did some troubleshooting until I found the text that had triggered the warning (it was completely innocuous, of course). Deleting the word or phrase resolved the issue.

 

I'll get blocked from even google.com if I connect to Charlotte, NC servers using my VPN service (IPVanish.) Seems that others are not being nice while using the Charlotte servers.

 

If you ever have a specific case you're interested in, there are those of us who enjoy trying to figure out what triggered it. Post a fresh screenshot of the error (so we know which block you hit), and a test screenshot of what you were trying to post.

 

While VPN's are a legitimate form of limited privacy, the fact of life is that some people use VPN's for bad things on websites, and so those sites will ban those specific IP addresses used by the bad folks. Often, if you just reconnect to your VPN using a different server (of which you should have a list of many), that fixes any denied access problems.