Harsh banning compers for comping

MaineBlue

Just posted a competition, as I sometimes do, and to my horror upon refreshing I discovered I have been banned!!!

'The administrator has banned your IP address

This isn't the first time this has happened and I know it has happened to other members i.e. banned just after they posted a competition.

I thought MSE (Devs) had fixed this but clearly not.

Just had to reset my router a few times until it found a new IP address and I could get back online

sleepyjones

Saw a bit of stuff about this but have never actually read anything to see why ... what exactly is the problem?

I assume it's an automatic thing, as opposed to a physical person clicking a "ban" button ... do we know what it is that triggers the auto ban?

MaineBlue

Nope; it happened earlier on this year and afaik it was all quite random. All who were banned were regular com posters too. Really thought they'd fixed it so no idea why I was banned tonight at all.

weeowens

Can't you reset your IP address as that worked for me when I got banned.

ETA: just spotted that you had :-)

fire**fly

sleepyjones wrote: »

Saw a bit of stuff about this but have never actually read anything to see why ... what exactly is the problem?

I assume it's an automatic thing, as opposed to a physical person clicking a "ban" button ... do we know what it is that triggers the auto ban?

threads here if it helps sleepyjones

Ip banned for posting a normal comp

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.php?p=68720794&postcount=74


http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.php?p=68729713&postcount=14


http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.php?p=68782427&postcount=31

IP Address blocked

happened to me as well & I emailed the team the first time,
second time I reset router &
that did the trick.
it's not just compers seems it happens on a few of the boards.

sleepyjones

Thanks Firefly ... a lot of those were probably the one's I'd noticed but had ignored, still not sure what the problem is though ... other than "could be interpreted as spam".

It's a bit unfortunate as i'm not sure how many people would actually know to/would want to reset their router. Hope they get it sorted.

fermi

Spam measures need to be slightly 'fuzzy' otherwise they are trivial to sidestep.

Means that occasionally you will get false positives the same as you do in other spam protection, or anti-virus etc. Sometimes these will not seem for very obvious reasons as they may be based on the technical nature of the contents or behaviour rather than what is posted looking like 'spam' to the casual observer.

Honestly, given how much and what is posted on the comping boards, I'm not surprised compers get caught a little more often than most.

Thing is to report it and keep on to get it fixed. After all fixing and making it better helps everyone.

Former_MSE_Andrea

Hi!

Our tighter spam measures mean sometimes a few genuine users get caught up.

If resetting your router doesn't work (you may need to try a few times) please email us on forumfeedback@ moneysavingexpert.com.

Thanks!

fermi

This post?

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.php?p=69112563&postcount=1

Fair number of characters in that post you would not normally expect to see on the forum. i.e. (R) and (TM).

Using non standard but similar character replacements to get around spam blocks is a common tactic spammers use, so that could be one trigger that may have done it.

Another trigger could have simply been that long list of similar items, as that is another thing the mass spammer like to do.

One danger of doing a straight copy/paste from a source site. Content may be fine there, but the forum may not like it here.

fermi

I ended up with this today, so it's not just compers. :rotfl: