No, I Didn't Ban You

This keeps coming up. I just want to state once again that 99% of you getting banned are not being banned intentionally.

I think what is happening is this: Comment-spammers -- all those comment advertisments you see for viagra and such -- post under false IPs through an anonymizer, then the system recognizes them as mass spammers, and bans the IP... but they were never really posting from that IP in the first place, just making it appear as if they were.

There are thousands of comment-spams per day, so a lot of IPs get banned. And then of course a real reader uses that IP, and guess what, it's banned.

Just write to me with your IP and the banned message (make sure you're getting the banned message -- if you're not, it's some other problem, like your computer's security system blocking the comment because it doesn't trust the site, which is something you have to fix on your end) and I'll ask Pixy to unban it (he controls the "blacklist").

He's on the other side of the world so sometimes this takes a day or so, and sometimes it takes longer if I miss your message. Try putting "Banned IP" in your subject line so I can do a simple search every few days to see if I've missed one.

Once in a while I do ban people. But usually it's for hardcore trolling, racism, repeatedly calling a female commenter a word that rhymes with bunt, etc. And usually there are warnings first.

Unless you've really deliberately tried to derail commenting or crossed the line in abusing another commenter, these bans are almost certainly inadvertent. Just let me know about them and I'll reverse the accidental ban.

PS: Don't take a nonresponse about a ban as an eff-you. In all likelihood I just missed your email entirely and don't even know you got banned.

Just write me again. Putting "Banned IP" in the subject line.

posted by Ace at 04:49 PM

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