Website says I've been blocked from desktop

[CadCom he/him]

I tried to log in on a desktop computer and got the response that I have been blocked. I attached a copy of what appeared. 

I was able to open up the website, but upon entering my email and password, this page came up. 

It advised I reference cloudflare ray ID 8efe49dda93e7c29

 

[Quantus he/him]

I had something similar happen to me, it was because of my VPN, something in their backend (or maybe just the IP it was showing the world) had been flagged for suspicious activity and added to some of the automatic filter databases.  

[CadCom he/him]

That computer does have a vpn sponsored by my employer so that could be it. 

[ShatteredDiamond She/Her]

Same thing happened to me. Went away by itself. It was a mini heart attack though, like what the heck did my siblings post on here to make them block me

[Duxredux he/him]

I'll add myself to this, as I have a productivity VPN on my mobile and laptop that doesn't seem to play nice with Cloudflare. This has not gone away by itself, and I had to log in on a different device to even be able to report it. Cloudflare blocked logging in, submitting a guest comment, or even using the Contact Us feature at the bottom of the website. On that note, it may be worth adding in an email that can be used to contact the forum someone on the website if we get a similar situation to mine as I didn't have a valid method to report the issue without finding a whole new device.

Laptop Cloudflare Ray ID: 8f40aa7adf3a0911

Mobile Cloudflare Ray ID: 8f40a9120f4b08aa

[Paleo he/him]

Thanks for those Ray IDs, @Duxredux, your traffic got flagged as "Definite bot" by Cloudflare, probably because they've seen bad traffic from IPs on that VPN.

We didn't anticipate Cloudflare's bot detection to be quite as aggressive, so had the "Definite bot" rule set to block all traffic by default. I have reduced this to a challenge now. So you will likely see Cloudflare's "Verify that you're a human" page now, but once that's done, you should be fine to use the site.

@CadCom Can you check if things work for you again from desktop now? If not, could you get me a new Ray ID? We can only investigate issues that go back at most 72 hours back, unfortunately.

[Duxredux he/him]

2 hours ago, Paleo said:

Thanks for those Ray IDs, @Duxredux, your traffic got flagged as "Definite bot" by Cloudflare, probably because they've seen bad traffic from IPs on that VPN.

We didn't anticipate Cloudflare's bot detection to be quite as aggressive, so had the "Definite bot" rule set to block all traffic by default. I have reduced this to a challenge now. So you will likely see Cloudflare's "Verify that you're a human" page now, but once that's done, you should be fine to use the site.

@CadCom Can you check if things work for you again from desktop now? If not, could you get me a new Ray ID? We can only investigate issues that go back at most 72 hours back, unfortunately.

Thanks Paleo! Logged in just fine. Windows sign in did not give me a "verify I'm human" page, but it did for the mobile login. No idea on the granularity that Cloudflare has, but feel free to @ or DM me and have me log out and log back in if you want a guinea pig to test changes to these settings. Looks like we had 4 members get flagged that could still report the issue, so that either is a pretty good false positive rate, or hiding everyone that couldn't even report, sign in, or register a new account. I for one am fine with trying to work with the VPN on my side to try to gain access if the new setting means you and the other mods have to go back to mass banning bots. That said, I do worry that seems to be a risk of humans not being able communicate at all with 17th Shard with the old settings so long as they are limited to devices on the VPN.

Well, hopefully others with similar issues will look at the tech support forums and find this. Anyone who can't sign in because of Cloudflare, if you have a VPN (virtual private network) ask the administrator for your device if you're not sure if you have one, it may have been flagged as a bot and you may need to find a device not on the VPN to temporarily login and report the issue to the admins. Hopefully that's enough keywords that this will pop up in a site search.

Edited December 20, 2024 by Duxredux