Can anyone tell me of any reason why an IP address will be banned by the administrator? My IP address at home has been banned and for the life of me, I don’t know why.
It might have been used by a spammer or some other pain in the ass. I don’t know which IP address you use at home and you shouldn’t post it, but if you message it to me or to an admin we can look into that.
Thanks for the reply. I’ll do that when I get to my house (am at work).
Ok. If you can’t login, send it by email.
When you get home go here:
Send that information to me in an email (TubaDiva AT aol DOT com) and I’ll look it up and see what’s happening.
Chances are someone in your vicinity is a spammer.
Perhaps a TraceRoute might be better, just in case one of the hops along the way has been banned? That’s TRACERT boards.straightdope.com at a command prompt on Windows machines.
Still haven’t heard back so I dunno – I am sorry that spammers are keeping someone legit off the board, we try hard to keep that from happening.
I’m not about to, but why is it bad to post your IP address? Is it mainly applicable to someone without a NAT router? Does the prevalence of dynamic IPs make a difference?
It’s a privacy issue. Even if you are behind a NAT or proxy, it gives enough lead to anyone who has other identifying information about you to narrow down your real life identity. And even without any other identifying information, it could give away your location (sometimes at a City, State level, sometimes at a neighborhood level, and sometimes at a single location level).
[Morbo]
IP addresses do not work that way!
[/Morbo]
The HTTP session is only aware of the source IP. Any routers traversed between the two machines are not relevant.
I modded a board a few years ago and I recall that we’d occasionally IP ban a persistent troll only to find that a whole bunch of innocent people had been banned along with him. It turned out that some big service providers used shared IPs, something we always had to double-check after that before IP banning.
We try to be judicious in our use of the IP ban – we don’t want to block legitimate users of the site.
It’s easier for us make these judgement calls when dealing with registered people on the board as opposed to guests. So it’s to your advantage to register and sign in to the board and not just lurk. Even if you don’t make posts to the board your registration IP gives us a benchmark so we don’t block access to legitimate users while we’re keeping spammers from coming in the door.
And hey, someday you might get a wild hair and become a subscriber. That’s a win-win for everybody.
This reminds me that I got this message almost everywhere I tried to log in while I was in Saigon, Vietnam. I’m not there now so I can’t say what the numerous/various IP addresses I had but it was my personal netbook and just about every coffee shop or hotspot I tried over the span of the two weeks I was there.
There is a “please contact the webmaster” email link on the IP Ban page, which I sent a query to but I never got a reply.
This can be a real issue, especially for ISPs servicing dial-up accounts that use “Dynamic IP Addressing” (I think I’ve got that right) which holds a pool of IP addresses and assigns them out to their subscribers as they connect. At one point I showed up on a board I was on staff on as being from Research Triangle Park, Atlanta, and Charlotte on three successive days(I was not in any of the above at the time).
But TCPIP does. It’s a subtle difference. The IP address of this PC - the source address for http requests - is from a private subnet; along the way it acquires a public one. It would not make sense to ban the private IP address.