Wide World of Women

So I've been a member on here since 2007 (I think), and I've never had an issue up until a couple of months ago. I typically log in once a week and just browse new posts in select forums on here.

So just recently, I'll be browsing along, and suddenly when I click "Next Topic" (like i usually do) I'll suddenly get a "Connecting..." in Chrome, and then maybe 30 seconds to a minute later I'll get this popup:

"Your connection to this server has been blocked in this server's firewall.

You need to contact the server owner for further information.

Your blocked IP address is 65.XX.XX.XX (hiding my real IP for this post)

This server's hostname is hawkeye.iwswebhosting.com"



So I'm thinking wtf?? So to get around this, I get on a different IP address (Tor IP) and access the forums. As soon as I log in under my username, the forum says my username and IP have been banned. So since it banned the new IP I had just got on, it has to be this forum that's issuing the ban.

I emailed the admin at this site and didn't hear anything back. Well the very next day, my IP and username are no longer banned. But, sure enough I start browsing the forums again, and after about 10 min, the exact same thing happens. I emailed the admin again and they tell me they aren't seeing me banned at all.

So I'm at a loss as to what's going on. Was seeing if anyone else has been through this. I wondered if maybe a particular forum thread was causing it, but it appears to be random.

I realize this is a free site for me, so I'm not going to yell and scream about this. I'm hoping one of the admins can look at the logs (given my real IP address) and maybe they can pinpoint what's happening on the networking/server side that's issuing this ban.

*sigh* It's still doing it. Guess I'll just live with it. Maybe it will magically fix itself.

Good, I'm not the only one.

Nice to know it's not just me.

Something has definitely changed. It started doing this in the summer. It's a free board so I'm not going to complain much about it. I'm hoping either it fixes itself, or it starts happening to enough people that they will look into it and hopefully fix it.

In the meantime, I've tried to find something that might be kicking it off, but so far, it really does appear random. Sometimes I'm on the board for 10 mins, sometimes 30 mins before it happens.

I checked the banned IPs vs your IPs and none of them match. It might be something with the hosting company banning IPs due to spamming, and unfortunately some members are close enough so it shows it's banned.

Well fudge.