VPNs banished on Saturn Forum?
 

Been a member here for well over a year now, and visit almost daily. Suddenly today, I am banned if I try to access the forum with my VPN active. I have to disable it to get to the forum. Is there justification for this? I can access all other web sites; at least the ones that I use.

I had trouble a couple years ago but it has been fine for quite a while either with or without my vpn.

No.... depends on your VPN service provider and the website.

Many internet hosting companies are no longer accepting anonymous connections through vpns. They want to see who is connecting, as many cyber attacks and other nefarious business can occur through a VPN connection. This makes it even more difficult to figure out who is attacking your network.

I have Norton VPN and here is what I see when I try to access this forum with the VPN on
https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.sat...f0f7b645e8.png
Since Norton uses the same blocks of IP addresses to relabel your real connection with, it is easy for this internet sites to figure out based on incoming traffic which blocks of IP addresses they need to disallow in order to keep you from connecting. It's too expensive for the VPN companies to keep buying and selling different IP addresses to get around this.

However, some of the smaller VPN offering companies probably have a bit more flexibility or have swapped out blocks of IP addresses that had been blocked by everybody for a fresh block of IP addresses totally unrelated to the old ones. In time, after enough visitors try to reach the website from that block of IP addresses, those will also be blocked.

So Andy, you lucked out.
Oldmarine, unfortunately you just got hosed.

A site may not have all of a VPN providers' IPs blocked, so it may just be the look of the draw as to which one you're getting routed through as to whether it is blocked or not.

Cloudflare is the software app running on their server. It compares your IP address to the banned list.

If you have access to the settings for your VPN, try to direct it to a different geographical area in the US to connect to the VPN server.

I have to be honest, fellas. I have no idea what the hell a VPN is, unless you mean virus protection network? Maybe??

VPN means Virtual Private Network. It's a service you can subscribe to for masking your computer/browser when visiting web sites. This prevents things as innocuous as determining where you're located to things as malicious as gaining access to your computer through your browser. I've been using one for over two years and only two sites have blocked me based on using a VPN, as derf pointed out. One is AutoZone, which I don't care, because I can use AdvanceAuto who still accepts me. This is the other one. I really enjoy the discussions and information here, so I'll just turn off my VPN to visit. :-)

Thanks for the explanation, oldmarine. I certainly appreciate it. My daughter must not have put one on my desktop, as I can still visit the Autozone site, no problems. It's rare that I visit there. I usually go to O'Reilys.

Part of the shame of it is that the parent company, Internet Brands, has implemented this across all of the xyzforum.com sites they host. So it affects many more sites than just saturnforum.com.
I was curious back when Andy first had issues.

Early in their ownership of the domains they were having a lot of problems with people hacking their ad links and other things that would throw malware popups out of nowhere. I think their domains are probably on one server farm, so it spreads quickly to all their hosted sites.
To their credit, I have not seen a popup in prob 5 years.

Here's a good overview of what your VPN does for you, expressed in terms of what your ISP cannot see when you use a VPN When you connect to a VPN, your internet service provider (ISP) can see that you’re connected to an IP owned by a VPN service. It might also know the time of your connection and the port your VPN protocol is using. Plus, the provider will see the amount of traffic traveling to and from your device.

Apart from these, the only other important thing your service provider can detect is the fact that your actual online traffic is hidden from them. That means it loses access to the following information:

• The websites you visit
• The specific web pages you browse and the time you spend there
• Your browsing and search history
• The files you download from or upload to unencrypted websites
• The info you type on unencrypted websites

source:. https://support.nordvpn.com/General-info/1061814732/What-does-my-ISP-see-when-I-am-connected-to-VPN.htm

I tried to make a link but it keeps redirecting to a different page. ??

NordVPN is the VPN that I am subscribed to, and I have been very happy there. I did find that I can select a different server in their network, that is not rejected by saturnforum.com. So I am satisfied for the time being. If I find I am banned again, I'll just find another server.

Good, please stick around.
Andy