Energy News Beat
Comment spammers are a scourge, and we crush them. But if your VPN assigns you an IP address that spammers had used to attack our comments, you get blocked. And this happens.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
VPNs can be great, and they work fine with WOLF STREET until they assign you an IP address that was previously assigned to spammers that attacked our comments. When that happens, you get blocked at the IP address, and you cannot access WOLF STREET at all.
Every time that you get on the internet, you get an IP address by your internet access provider. Your IP address doesn’t reveal to the internet who you are, but it reveals the area you’re in, and the name of your service provider.
One of the advantages of a VPN is that it assigns you an IP address in a city of your choice to conceal your location and service provider. Instead, it shows the VPN provider or a data center in the city that you chose.
Every day, Wolf Street comments get hundreds and sometimes thousands of spam comments, and I have layers of robust defenses to deal with those spam comments efficiently. But occasionally, they snare innocent bystanders.
Spammers are ruining everything. But VPN outfits that do business with spammers, or that assign IP addresses that were used by spammers, are just as bad.
When WOLF STREET receives a spam comment from an IP address, the WOLF STREET firewall sets up a block to prevent that IP address from accessing the site in the future.
These spammers are machines (bots), not humans, and they don’t use the user-interface that you see and interact with. They bypass the user-interface. So they don’t even notice when they get blocked, and they keep generating hits that get blocked. Here are the winners (I cut out the IP addresses and added the red comments):
The number of US IP addresses that get blocked by Wolf Street’s firewall is fairly small, and a tiny portion of the 1.5 billion assigned IP addresses in the US. But VPNs don’t control that many IP address in the US. They control some and rotate them around. So if you choose an IP address in the US, there is a well-above-zero chance that some day you could get blocked.
Most spam comments on WOLF STREET originate from foreign IP addresses, and by now a lot of foreign IP addresses are permanently blocked by the WOLF STREET firewall. Many have IP addresses assigned to data centers in Pakistan, Russia, Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. WOLF STREET has almost no readers in those countries. Another big batch has IP addresses assigned to data centers in Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, Italy, etc., where WOLF STREET has some readers, but not many.
If your VPN assigns you an IP address from a data center in a foreign country, there is a not insignificant chance that it was previously assigned to spammers and has gotten permanently blocked by the WOLF STREET firewall (Wordfence).
How do you know if you’re blocked?
If you’re blocked at the IP address, you cannot access WOLF STREET at all. You will see an essentially blank page with some text, including “Wordfence” and “advance block,” and “contact site administrator,” which is me.
What to do if you get blocked at the IP address.
If you use a VPN and you get blocked, you can do one of these two things to get around the block:
- Either, in the VPN screen, select a different city so that the VPN assigns you a different IP address. For better results, choose a city in the US.
- Or temporarily turn off the VPN to access WOLF STREET.
Well-run corporate VPNs generally control their IP addresses and don’t have those issues. It’s many of the other dime-a-dozen VPN services that cause problems.
If you don’t use a VPN but get blocked…
… contact me at my public email address so that I can check into it:
Or, if you already have my business email, contact me through that email. Or, if you’re a WOLF STREET email subscriber and get blocked when you click on the article headline, use the “reply” function in your email system to tell me about it. Your reply will go to me.
Enjoy reading WOLF STREET and want to support it? You can donate. I appreciate it immensely. Click on the mug to find out how:
The post Dear WOLF STREET Readers: Are You Using a VPN? Here’s Why You Might Get Blocked and What You Can Do if You Get Blocked appeared first on Energy News Beat.
