Sorry, you have been blocked

[Financial-Modeller]

Couldn't access UKBF yesterday or today, with a landing page saying I'm unable to access it and the (Firefox) browser tab saying Attention Required Cloudfare.

A different laptop, using same browser on same OS (Win10) with same VPN (Nord) on same network is fine.

Today I tried again with first laptop and got same msg. Switched off the VPN and can access the site normally on it. Second laptop works perfectly with VPN connected normally. Seems strange.

Sharing here is case anyone with greater IT expertise than me has anything that may help the next person who gets that message.

 

[Paul Carmen]

The VPN is likely the issue, I expect the IP range is being blocked. You get this challenge too with VPNs using Google & their tools often.

 

[Ethan39]

Hiya, I think I can answer this here.

We've had an avalanche of spam coming into the forum (most of which has been swept away by our diligent moderators either before being publicly posted or very quickly after appearing) in the last two weeks or so. The vast majority of this has been coming from VPN traffic.

We've disabled a handful of the VPNs being used by the spammers in the short term until a more permanent solution can be found to limit the spam. Apologies for this, but the decision was made to try and keep the site quality up and give our moderators more room to breathe. Work has already started on changing the registration process so we can filter out more of these malicious users and bots, once we're confident that the flood has subsided we'll take another look at the decision to remove certain VPNs.

Thanks for reaching out.