Over the past few months, I’ve received a few emails from honest-to-goodness people blocked because they are connecting form China. I’ve always gotten emails from people whos IPs were — through no fault of their own– listed in “StopForumSpams” spammers list. I’ve generally given people advice, and when necessary tweaked the bot-blocking software to create single case exceptions. However, there are enough single-IP exception that I decided I need a broader “workaround”. I have currently devised the following workaround which works to get around a few specific ‘rules’ in the blocking software. The work around is this:<\/p>\n
Spoof your user agent to read “Lucia Special user agent for The Blackboard”. It must read exactly<\/i> that but you need only spoof when visiting The Blackboard. Use of this user agent will:<\/p>\n The description of what it does may sound convoluted. The path is you->Cloudflare->ZBblock->the joy of reading The Blackboard. <\/p>\n The special user agent will only<\/i> help at ZBblock which has a rule to bounce you if you come from “CN”. These people are presented a message telling people to contact me if they wish to be whitelisted. I have about a dozen Chinese IP ranges whitelisted). The difficulty for people in China is that many<\/i> Chinese IPs have been permanently banned owing to the numerous hack, spam or scrape attempts form Chinese ranges. So, if you happen to know someone who mentions they were banned, then possibly they can learn about the issue and contact me. A similar difficulty happens with IP’s listed on Stop Forum Spam. For example: a fairly frequent visitor signed on to a new<\/i> ISP service, obtained a static IP and found himself blocked. The difficulty is that quite likely a spammer previously used that IP. While this can probably be sorted out, in the meantime, he would like to comment. So, spoofing the user agent trick will work.<\/p>\n How can you spoof<\/b> You can test the effectiveness of your switching by testing the switch for “http:\/\/whatsmyuseragent.com\/” and afterwards seeing if that worked. <\/p>\n Owing to the possibility that bots operated by actual humans might wish to spam my comments, the special useragent may change from time to time. For now this should work like a (somewhat cumbersome) charm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the past few months, I’ve received a few emails from honest-to-goodness people blocked because they are connecting form China. I’ve always gotten emails from people whos IPs were — through no fault of their own– listed in “StopForumSpams” spammers list. I’ve generally given people advice, and when necessary tweaked the bot-blocking software to create … Continue reading Got blocked? Workaround.<\/span> \n
\nIf you use Firefox it is very easy to spoof agents. Visit useragent switcher<\/a>, install and start switching. For reasons of privacy and functionality of other web sites, you will probably want to adjust the setting to switch only<\/I> when you are at “http:\/\/rankexploits.com” and turn off user agent switching otherwise. Turning the spoofing switch on and off is a bit of a pain in the neck, but it’s somewhat more convenient than getting banned, writing me, having me code a workaround for your IP and then visiting again. So if your IP is listed on StopForumSpam or you are in China, this should be a convenience. <\/p>\n