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nacoran
9310 posts
Dec 06, 2016
2:40 PM
We seem to still be having problems with people being able to access the site from parts of Europe, particularly the closer you get to Russia. My guess is that our spam filters are catching people whose traffic may be routed through routers associated with spam. The problem is that we usually hear about these problems when a traveller gets back to somewhere where they can access us, and that means that we can't run a trace on the problem address.

So, two things- first, can we get a sound off from people who are in potentially affected areas. This will, obviously, only reach people who can access the site, but it may let us infer the extent of the problem. And second, if anyone is planning on travelling to these areas could you email us if you run into any problems. You can send it to membership@modernbluesharmonica.com or to my hotmail address (which is my username at hotmail.com).

There is a short .rar file we can send you to test to see where the issue is. Our hosts won't remove the block globally, but if we can narrow its focus a bit we can make it less of a burden.

Anyone in touch with people in those areas, maybe you could ask them to see if they can access us. That will help us build a map.

Thanks,
Nate

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Nate
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First Post- May 8, 2009
Gnarly
2038 posts
Dec 06, 2016
2:41 PM
Good lord have mercy on us all
MN
420 posts
Dec 06, 2016
2:45 PM
No problem here in Prague.
Martin
1099 posts
Dec 06, 2016
3:35 PM
As you may remember, I had problems fairly recently: blocked from the site. Second time this happened.
I think your hosts should reconsider their policy -- also, their stratagems for solving the problem was not very helpful, not at either of the times.
I live in Sweden.
JustFuya
1008 posts
Dec 06, 2016
8:00 PM
I am wondering why a spam filter is necessary given that we have to be logged on in order to post.
nacoran
9311 posts
Dec 06, 2016
11:34 PM
Martin, I've suggested that. The problem is that we aren't their only site. Most of the sites they host are more traditional e-commerce sites that want customer feedback without having to approve new members for the members to post. Low traffic pages can get buried quickly, and the setting is global- it can either be on for all sites or off for all sites. (That in itself is a flawed integration, but it's what they have.)

My dream setup would be that the spam filter would flag potential problems but not actually remove them. That would let us check and delete any spam that did get through all in one folder. I'd also like the captcha to stop after you've got 100 posts, for the automatic password reset to be fixed, (although right now that allows us to block people for a short time by changing their password, so they'd need to do something to fix that too.) We also need an audio captcha. There was at least one user who couldn't post because he was blind. He could get his text reader to read the posts but couldn't answer the captchas.

We've looked at other software, but the problem is that the good forum software out there has patches to port from popular forum software, that is, the #1 forum software can port from the #2 and vise versa, but we are so far down the list we'd need a custom plug-in to do the port, which is beyond my abilities, and for better or worse, I'm the tech guy for most of this stuff.

JustFuya, it isn't for our site. Every day when I restore the spam posts I put a number down on a sheet of paper to keep track of how many it got wrong. The number, since I started keeping track, which was less than a year ago, is over 500. And it has caught zero actual spams.

And the site is invisible in parts of Eastern Europe and Russia- I mean, they can't even access the site, let alone post, unless they do funny tricks to get around the block, and China is in the same boat.

There is better software out there, but porting everything from one to the other is the big issue. You have to port the membership, port the old posts, do all the things to keep your page rank and url...

So for now, I'm working on the pieces we have control on.

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Nate
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First Post- May 8, 2009
JustFuya
1009 posts
Dec 07, 2016
10:54 AM
I looked into your site over a year ago during a thread on this same issue. I'm aware that many sites share servers but this was the first time I came across a domain [modernbluesharmonica.com] that shares an IP address. I assume the address is resolved by name at your host server. Public DNS servers point several different websites to your IP (115 sites is probab1ly a flawed memory but it is ballpark from that time). I think I was having trouble accessing your site and had tried typing the IP in the location bar to no avail.

If one of the sites that shares your IP is branded a bad player, all of the other sites using that IP might be blocked. Different DNS servers act differently and affect your browsing in many ways.

It's also possible that some browsers/firewalls balk at the redirect that is done at your host server (IP 69.90.45.118). But this is all guesswork.

Edited to edit edits and to clarify.

Last Edited by JustFuya on Dec 07, 2016 3:33 PM
JustFuya
1010 posts
Dec 07, 2016
11:00 AM
If I was having repeated problems with a site I would manually enter a free DNS IP in my network configuration rather than the one that is automatically supplied by my ISP.

When I did computers at a bank they had me install a 'nanny' in order to create a log of who went where. It was easily avoided by using the above suggestion.
nacoran
9313 posts
Dec 07, 2016
11:21 AM
JustFuya, I didn't know about the redirect. Interesting. As for the DNS switch, yeah, that's the best work around. I suspect the spammers already do that!

Actually, spam has been way down since Google changed their ranking algorithm. They used to rank pages based on the number of links from and to respected sites, which encouraged spammers to try to embed as many links to their sites everywhere as they could. When they moved on to different metrics the spam fell off precipitously.

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Nate
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First Post- May 8, 2009
JustFuya
1011 posts
Dec 07, 2016
3:49 PM
I just did a reverse IP lookup. As of this minute there are 61 other domains using your specific IP address. Probably saves the host a few yearly registration bucks that add up. Clever if that last hop doesn't trip you up.

origin: as13768
status: REASSIGNMENT
descr: Peer1 Route Object
route: 69.90.44.0/22
netname: PEER1-EZPRO-12
inetnum: 69.90.45.0 - 69.90.45.255
mnt-by: maint-as13768
org: EZPRO-1
nacoran
9319 posts
Dec 09, 2016
12:36 PM
Very interesting. I'm not sure if that would be an issue though. Almost without exception the blocks are reported in the eastern parts of Europe. It blocks them from accessing the site at all.

We have had, off the top of my head, only three or four cases where it didn't fit that criteria, and those all turned out to be specific addresses that got blocked.

So far the various solutions we've used, in order that we try them...

1. We have a little .rar file that we send that generates a report. We send this to our host and it tells us if a specific address is blocked. If it is, we can get the specific address whitelisted by the host.

2. We ask the user if they have a static or a dynamic IP address. If the block is part of a large swath of blocked addresses we see if the person can get switched to a static address, and then go back to step one. If the specific address is blocked then we can either do the whitelist solution or the person can switch to a dynamic IP. Unfortunately, we don't have access to the blocking list. We have to have the hosts check that.

3. Get the user to use a public DNS. Ideally this would be the first solution because it should, theoretically, work all the time, doesn't involve getting support tickets (each time we send a ticket in it takes a day each leg of the trip- us, support, back to the forum user, us, support... it can get crazy pretty quick.) A lot of people are uneasy messing with their internet settings and even although it's pretty straight forward switching DNS can be nerve racking, since you can screw up you internet access... and if you have just one device you can't look up how to fix it! (The level of internet savvy members have has increased tons over the years. We seem to be getting used to the internet!)

4. Have the user use a TOR browser. This is simple and works 100% of the time, but the privacy of a TOR browser (you never get on a harmonica players watch list!) comes at a huge browsing speed cost.

I've got a friend who is a network specialist. I'll see if he knows of any issues with sharing an IP. It seems like a risky policy for a host. Your right, if one of the sites they host went rogue and started spamming people the response from other sites spam filters might be to block us all. I could see how it would save some cash though.

I actually saw an interesting map the other day. It showed how internet traffic is distributed. Unfortunately it only shows the U.S. positions. I'll have to see if I can find a European version to see if I can find a pattern.

http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/how-not-to-map-the-internet


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Nate
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First Post- May 8, 2009
Shaganappi
139 posts
Dec 09, 2016
1:44 PM
Not sure if it has anything to do with the problem but will share.

I have found in the past 2 months that there has been a crazy amount of extra spam traffic that has made it to my webpage (on harp notation). Like 10 times the traffic.

And along with it has been a lot of election stuff. My (Google) analytics say that close to 90% of it is from Russia with special offers to login and vote (or something) for one of the parties. I only got it to stop by using a filter. Weird.


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