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Contact to the Administrator

Posted: 03 Feb 2021, 11:46
by Fiferion
Hey, I have a weird experience and have to contact to admin of the site, which is called Board Administrator. I am completely new here and posted only one topic on this site. Nothing more, nothing less. I am looking for that topic, to see if there is any answer, so I have this site on my PC's bookmarks and also on Android browser.
Today morning I looked on my smartphone and received this:
Image

Then I opened my PC browser and here everything is fine. I am on my PC now.
I don't know anything about "spaming some trash", because I didn't do anything. Only reading(exactly looking for responses to my topic).
How can I contact the Board Administrator? I found some of them in The Team section, but there is no possibility to contact them. I am confused now.

Yes, I am writing in on this part of forum, because I don't want to get banned for any reason. Now I feel like I am treated on very tough rules. :?

Re: Contact to the Administrator

Posted: 03 Feb 2021, 17:41
by AnyOldName3
We banned some spambot IP addresses, but it looks like half the internet is sharing those IP addresses.

Re: Contact to the Administrator

Posted: 03 Feb 2021, 17:55
by psi29a
We were very specific to just 255 addresses, as we got 2 spambots on 141.101.77.*

So we are at an impasse here between protecting the forum from spammers and allowing normal users to browse the forum on their mobile.

Re: Contact to the Administrator

Posted: 04 Feb 2021, 08:10
by Husaco
Cloudflare addresses, apparently. The simplest thing I suppose would be to change the block message to explain that a lot of traffic gets routed through those addresses including a lot of spam.

Re: Contact to the Administrator

Posted: 04 Feb 2021, 09:40
by psi29a
Well, the root of the problem is that on his PC everything works great so local ISP works as expected, it's his mobile network provider that's the problem... probably NAT-ing behind one IP with hundreds of others. It would make sense that a spammer would use this because banning that IP would then have collateral damage.

As suggested in another thread/topic, perhaps we should step back from this anti-spam approach we currently have and have an entirely creative anti-bot question set that requires someone to follow instructions.

Re: Contact to the Administrator

Posted: 04 Feb 2021, 15:22
by AnyOldName3
It's almost certainly a Cloudflare problem. My home IP hasn't changed for months, but I just checked the admin logs and they're showing my logins as having lots of different IP addresses, none of which are my actual IP address. That means our Cloudflare protection has wiped out our ability to IP ban. Maybe there's a PhpBB plugin that lets it know the original address?

Re: Contact to the Administrator

Posted: 04 Feb 2021, 15:44
by psi29a
I'm curious as to why this problem is showing up just now? Perhaps CF changed something?

Anyway, we can just not ban based on IP and we can move on with plan C with Q/A robot test.

Re: Contact to the Administrator

Posted: 04 Feb 2021, 18:56
by sheepy
These might be useful. Sorry if you already knew about them.

Restoring Visitor IPs
https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us ... isitor-IPs

Cloudflare’s current IP ranges (includes 141.101.64.0/18)
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/ips/

Re: Contact to the Administrator

Posted: 05 Feb 2021, 11:52
by psi29a
Thanks Sheepy:

I followed the advice here:
https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us ... -addresses

Looks like we're back and can now see the 'real' IP addresses again.

I'll look through our IP ban list and remove CF entries.