A few members banned

[christianbrat]

Heyo just chiming in. A few members on fb have been banned. please see the pic for more details. Stanley is in Richmond and is very much real and a contributing member.

[Hunter]

I have the same problem....  I am a contributing member here and all I did was go to CA for a week and then find myself banned if using my laptop.   I am a member of multiple forums including:  Bloody Decks, Hewes Owners, Harley, etc...... and none of these forums have these issues.   As long as I have my member name and password there are no issues.    Only with the Arima forum.   I think this forum needs to figure out what it is that makes it more difficult to stay connected.   The other forums seem to have figured it out and it works fine for them.

[StreamFixer]

I can help explain a bit of what is going on.  When someone applies for membership onto the forum, we receive a notice if the user name, e-mail or IP has been involved in spamming., phishing or other activities that we do not want to expose the membership to.  We generally take care of this by banning individual IP addresses.  When we receive notice of a hacker with an IP from say China, the entire IP will be banned.  For example: we received several applications from IP's beginning with 120.  After an IP search we discovered those IP were located in China.  We assumed there are very few Arima's in China so the entire IP address beginning with 120 has been banned.  We made similar assumptions for applications originating in the Ukraine, The Balkans, the list goes on. 

There are also a very few areas of the US that have received similar treatment because of the plethora of attempts by known spammers to access the forum from those areas.  Since IP's have four groups of up to 3 places each, we can actually sort those bans to very narrow areas.  However, if you attempt to access from a WiFi internet site open to public access, you might be doing so from an individually banned site.  That can cause you problems when you get home.  Read below on a couple things you can do about it.  Danno is the expert in addressing those issues.

Facebook access:  To my knowledge, this forum does not have a Facebook presence so attempting to get a message to us from there is not going to be too effective unless someone relays that information.

So what does that mean to you guys?  For a start we have prevented well over a half million spammers and hackers from having access to our membership base.  If you travel and log into the net in a banned area you are not likely to get in.  Further your device will carry that IP address back with you and likely interfere with your access once you are clear of the banned IP.  Our members who are international pilots seem to have the most problems as their work may take them into those areas.

What to do about it:  The first thing is to clear your cache, and internet access history.  If that does not take care of the problem connect with Danno.  That stuff is way beyond my knowledge base.

Finally, it is not our goal to prevent our members from accessing the site.  It is, however, our goal to protect our membership base from unwanted phishing, spamming, hacking, and unwanted behavior (what I call assholery).  We are always open to recommendations and suggestions that will help us in fulfilling those goals.  Please let us know if you have ideas that might help.

StreamFixer

[Hunter]

Please let us know if you have ideas that might help.
StreamFixer

I still don't get why other forums don't have this issue or why traveling to the Sacramento, CA area would result in a ban.  Also, I am back home now in WA and connected to my home WIFI network and still getting the same Banned message when I try to log in on my laptop.   My desktop that is hooked to the same network works fine.  One thing I found is that I only get the Banned message when I try to log in using my laptop and using Chrome.    If I use IE, I can log-in fine with the same laptop using the same network....

The other thing I see is that the messaging states that I am banned from using the forum and that the ban is NOT set to expire.    This tells me that one of the admins can go into the admin control panel to my individual user name and either remove the ban or set it to expire.   Hoping that someone will please do that for me.     Thanks!   

[disposable]

Hoping that someone will please do that for me.     Thanks!   

hunter, you're being paged on aisle 9. topic of TWINS came up again.

[StreamFixer]

The other thing I see is that the messaging states that I am banned from using the forum and that the ban is NOT set to expire.    This tells me that one of the admins can go into the admin control panel to my individual user name and either remove the ban or set it to expire.   Hoping that someone will please do that for me.     Thanks!   

Hunter..  I just checked our banned list.  Your individual IP, nor any IP's near it, are banned.  I have no idea why you are only having the problem with Chrome..  Every once in while I run into a site that I cannot access with Chrome, but works fine on Bing, Firefox and other access platforms.  Something about Chrome I guess..

Also, remember you can usually get to me from the Hewes site.

StreamFixer

[Danno]

I still don't get why other forums don't have this issue or why traveling to the Sacramento, CA area would result in a ban.  Also, I am back home now in WA and connected to my home WIFI network and still getting the same Banned message when I try to log in on my laptop.   My desktop that is hooked to the same network works fine.  One thing I found is that I only get the Banned message when I try to log in using my laptop and using Chrome.    If I use IE, I can log-in fine with the same laptop using the same network....

The other thing I see is that the messaging states that I am banned from using the forum and that the ban is NOT set to expire.    This tells me that one of the admins can go into the admin control panel to my individual user name and either remove the ban or set it to expire.   Hoping that someone will please do that for me.     Thanks!   

The other forums have advertisements. We do not. Advertisements pay for smart tech people. I am not a smart tech person. The forum members have been generous in helping me cover my costs here but it would never cover coding folks. And then every time I upgrade the software, I'd have to pay them again if the upgrades modified the coding I paid for.

I don't understand IP's very well hence why I asked the questions noted on another thread. Hunter, if your desktop is working fine, then I suggest you perform the steps noted in the "I've been banned" thread in this category on your laptop. If it doesn't, give me a call. I'll send you my phone number in a PM.

The page that comes up when a banned IP is noted is autogenerated and I don't know how to find it or change it. I would like to post the steps to resolve it on it to help. The admin panel does have an option to ban IP's for a time period but we never ban anyone without a lot of discussions with them first hence it either gets resolved or they get a permanent ban. As seen with Mustang, there's a lot of ways around the ban so it's not a perfect system. When we ban IP's from spammers, we wouldn't waste our time with time limited ban. The problem is when a regular member's IP is caught in the range of a spammer, the get the same ban notice. We get notified and try to sort out the problem.

So far, we've been able to work out the issue with every accidental member ban if they're willing to put in some effort to help themselves. The two that we can't fix is with people using VPN's and people trying to connect through their employer's network where they have banned access to forums.

I am a member of the Arima Boat Owners Group on Facebook and help people with ArimaOwners issues when they ask. The group belongs to Defiance/Arima so I don't control anything over there. FB sucks for hobby forums so that group really doesn't compete with us.

Lastly, the admins and moderators have lives away from ArimaOwners so our response times can be delayed. Hunter, I did send you an email while you were in Sacramento but never heard back from you. Did you get my email?

[svo13sg]

Got banned yesterday when travelling from WA to San Francisco. Clear browser cookies and cache for arimaowners.com allows me to regain access.