Okay, the first bit of strangeness I saw was when I changed my email to something I don’t care about being available to the general public. That I figured out really quick when I saw I had to reactivate my account from that email address.
Earlier today I tried to post something on one of the silly Star Trek threads and it told me that my IP address or something was banned. Whyzzat? Apparently I’m able to get back in. I know I posted something a bit coarse earlier but still it surprised me.
Just curious about what’s going on.
This is just a guess. In fact, it’s a total WAG.
Your IP address may have been banned because of a little bit of weirdness inherent in the nature of the internet. IP addresses are assigned by some central registry (I can’t recall the acronym of the top of my head, much less the full name). The number of possible adresses is limited, and that caused a problem when the 'net really took off.
Most IP providers have a range of addresses assigned to them and they don’t have enough to give one to each of their customers. Not every customer is going to be on-line at the same time as every other, so what the providers do is “re-use” the addresses. In other words, every time you sign on, you get some random address in your provider’s range.
My WAG is that this board has had a lot of trolling and/or sock-puppet activity from your IP, and the Admins just decided to ban the whole range, since banning individual addresses would be pointless and stupid.
This might knock out a few legitimate users, but the odds that more than one member falls within a certain range have to be extremely low.
Again, that’s just a WAG.
Incidentally, I am profoundly color-blind, and that purple color you use for your posts looks like muddy-grey-on-grey to me, and is very difficult to read.
Exgineer’s guess is probably what’s happening. We’ll check on it.