Anyone else banned from Doomworld?

[scalliano]

I was on Doomworld the other day and all I did was reply to a DM. I've just gone on today and I'm banned with no reason given.

I've literally had 2 warnings the entire time I've been on that site, and the last one was almost five years ago.

Anyone else experiencing this?

[Enjay]

I very rarely comment on Doomworld these days. I'm showing as having a registration date of October 2000 but I was definitely on there before 2000 (I remember contributing to the discussion of the release of Boom in 1998). Maybe the 2000 date reflects a change in forum software or something.

Anyway, even if I don't do much posting I still visit reasonably frequently and I did post a comment in the last few days, and I have answered a few DMs too. So, no, that's not happened to me.

[scalliano]

Any ideas how I can resolve this? Did a bit of digging and from what I can gather it may point to me running a VPN and getting IP banned, but because of how the site handles bans I have absolutely no recourse.

EDIT: Yeah, it's an IP ban. Tried incognito mode and still banned. Switched to a different proxy and I'm back in again. Why do I only ever figure things out AFTER wasting everyone's time?

[drfrag]

Probably you're sharing IP with someone else or they banned a range of IPs against bots. Y wenas.

[Enjay]

I was on there earlier today and I had my VPN active so that I could see the images that people had posted using Imgur. Although I didn't get a ban, I did get a "verifying you are human" screen before I was allowed to actually go on the forum. I don't normally see that on Doomworld so, yeah, it was certainly detecting something that it wanted to verify about me with my VPN active before it would allow me on.


Side point: Imgur's ban on the UK is a right pain.

[scalliano]

Yeah, same here and for the same reasons - I've been getting those Cloudflare screens ever since I started using one. Ironically it was a UK server that I was connected to when this happened.

The OSA is breaking everything.

[Enjay]

The OSA is breaking everything.

I thought that too - but despite the fact that everyone is blaming the OSA, this one is mostly not because of that. Media Labs (the current owners of Imgur) were under investigation already (pre OSA) by the UK government watchdog because there were concerns over how Media Labs ensured the safety of users' data and what they were doing with users' data. It seemed that they were probably not in compliance with data security regulations and were probably doing inappropriate things with the data that they held on users. They were asked to provide assurances and evidence of their procedures and in what was described as "a purely commercial decision" by them they said, "nah, we're not doing that, we'll just ban the UK instead."

Media Labs are well known as a pretty ruthless company. A large part of their business model is buy a website, sack anyone they can and replace them with bots and/or cheap labour, enshitify the site to milk as much money from it as possible, and then cut loose when the site starts becoming less profitable. They had already started doing that: lots of Imgur staff have already been sacked, and there were several big protests on Imgur because of it. So, while the OSA is a mess and very badly implemented, this one is more on Media Labs than it is on the OSA. So, even though the OSA is bad, Media Labs are not getting the hate they deserve for this situation. It was their choice to ban the UK, not government legislation, and the situation springs from them probably not looking after users and users' data properly in the first place.

As a side point, much as I don't like the implementation of the OSA, it's actually had a minimal impact on me. Discord and Nexus Mods have asked me to prove that I'm not a child, and that's been it.

[scalliano]

Fair enough.

This aside, the impact on myself has been minimal too, but it is the reason that I've been forced at the tender age of 47 to sign up for a credit card for the first time in my life - one that I have zero intention of ever using for anything other than age verification, and even then where there's no other alternative (hello Steam) simply because I do not trust the "trusted third parties" with my passport data. A position recently vindicated by the Discord customer support leak.

[Enjay]

Yes, I think trusting the third parties is one of the biggest weaknesses in the thing. I simply do not trust them :
a) to delete the data that they say they will after verification
b) be secure enough to protect that data
c) be moral enough not to use the data for something that I don't approve of

I used the face identification method. My name and face are already linked elsewhere on teh intarwebs. So, aside from helping train some AI face-recognition bot somewhere, I don't suppose things have really changed.

[JohnnyTheWolf]

I was permabanned, but recently I became unable to view Doomworld at all. Dynamo and Mordeth were kind enough to help me figure this out, but the best they have been able to do was to reduce my ban status to read-only and I still need to use Brave's TOR mode to view Doomworld.

[Phredreeke]

as is the Internet Archive