Re: Debian wiki blocks VPN provider

Hi,

The Debian wiki is blocking me (my VPN provider) again.

How are spam complaints the problem of VPN providers, seeing how reputable VPN's do not log their users' traffic? If they do that (like mine) they should not have the means to act on (or even recognize) spam. You're also blocking users of TOR and other privacy and anti-censorship tools this way.

To me it seems the problem is that the Debian wiki only has very course means of dealing with spam. Would it be very hard to replace this block with a read-only mode, like Wikipedia does? If you don't mind me asking, what stack is the Debian wiki built on and could I perhaps help implement this read-only mode?

Best regards,

Willem

2016-05-23 16:47 GMT+02:00 Steve McIntyre <93sam@debian.org>:

On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 04:18:48PM +0200, Willem Mali wrote:
>Hi,
>
>Your wiki blocks the IP address of my VPN provider. Whenever I connect from
>my VPN I get the following response:
>
><!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
><title>403 Forbidden</title>
><h1>Forbidden</h1>
><p><p>You are not allowed to access this!</p></p>
>
>However, when I use my own IP or that of my work, the page loads normally.
>The IP address that got the forbidden response was: 104.156.228.110. I also
>tried a few of my VPN provider's addresses, but all of them got the same
>403 response.

That netblock was blocked due to spam attacks, but that was a few
months ago so I've removed the block again.

>Why is the wiki blocking any IP addresses at all? I don't understand why
>the decision has been made to wholesale block access to VPN providers.

It's nothing specific to VPN providers - it's just unfortunate that
most VPN providers ignore spam complaints and so legitimate users get
hit by the filtering and blocking that follows.

--
Steve McIntyre 93sam@debian.org
Debian wiki admin - wiki.debian.org