Hello, Sectorgame comrades.

I'm Alex Navarro, FreeSpace 2 spaniard translator and novice modder (The Great War: Independence). I've been an user and player of FreeSpace 2 and Hard-Light Productions for many years (player since 1999, of course lol). And I'm calling for your help, please.

It seems I was banned from HLP a couple of weeks ago. And not only me, but the entire island where I live. Everytime I try to enter to HLP forums (from different computers in different places) I get this message:

An Error Has Occurred!

Sorry Guest, you are banned from using this forum!
This Hostname/Domain has been banned due to too many attempts or due to too many multiple account registrations.
This ban is not set to expire.

I can't even visit the page as a guest. I don't know what this means. A hacker trying to screw HLP from my PC or something? Or is it an administration mistake?

Please, any of you can help me figure out what's happening, try to contact with any HLP moderator? If I was banned from there, I would like to know why.

Thank you for listening. I hope this is just a missunderstanding

Onto it, you should be back again before too long.

To clarify, there has been a big push by the admins to get rid of spambots (which are going nuts at the moment) - looks like you've been caught up in that (accidentally I'm sure).

Yeah, unfortunately some of the filtering measures have been a bit overzealous, and have inadvertently targeted actual people.

Oh hey, I do have an account here. Wacky.

Anyway, I was able to pull up your account details on HLP, but the domain used the last time you connected is not listed, just IP address. Which, since that was not specifically banned, means that it happened on a hotsmask/domain name level.

I'd need to know what your connections announced domain name or registered hostmask is in order to remove which ever ban trigger is blocking it.

And while "overzealous" might be applicable in this case, there are some IP blocks that are so saturated that it's usually easier and safer to start large and then whittle down rather than tackle them block at a time. And for the fact that I'm only one person and so far as I am aware, the -only- person attempting to do anything about the sudden and rampant upsurge in spam and bot registrations, it's in a word "overwhelming" and for lack of anybody else doing it means there isn't anybody else doing any better. At some point very soon, that will all be moot and we won't have to rely on ban triggers to keep the forums relatively clean (and if you think that it's not so bad now, you don't want to see what would happen if I removed all of them).

Maybe a safe proxy would help for the time being. If I need to, I either use hidemyass or adfree proxy. It can be hard to find a good one.

I'd prefer to address the problem of allowing legitimate (non-bot members) to be able to access directly without having to go through proxies that can just as easily be blocked (and some of them probably are)

(In case it was not clear from the tone used to address the issue, yes, I am an Administrator on HLP. Just realized that such a fact might not have been obvious. And a reply via PM would work perfectly. Or if you have IRC, Esper.net has a #hard-light channel)

All this time I thought you were just a moderator. Maybe you were recently promoted in the last month or two since I think your admin title under your name is fairly new. Maybe you replace Fury.

Why do you even care, gary?

And why do you care enough to ask me why I care? Being a coder and busy with FSO, I would think you have more important things to do or care about than to care about what little old me has to say.

Hello, people. Nice to see known faces here, I missed you lol. And thanks for the replies.

I'd need to know what your connections announced domain name or registered hostmask is in order to remove which ever ban trigger is blocking it.

Ah....... what?

I'm sorry. What do you need me to do exactly? How can I get those?

Find your IP (www.whatismyip.com) then open a command line and type nslookup [ip you got from whatismyip]. I'm guessing that's what he wants.

thank you. that helped

Resolved.

Woot. Man, though, these bots are becoming ridiculous.

These days bots are smarter than humans half the time. You can't make a CAPTCHA that they can't solve, it seems, without making it impossible for a human as well.