Friends of Captain Awkward

I just tried to log into the forum from my iPhone -- something I've done hundreds of times -- and I got a message that I am "permanently banned" from this board, as well as the following message: "A ban has been issued on your IP address."

I refreshed the window on my phone and tried again: same result.

:(((((((

I walked to the other end of my house to log in through my laptop, and here I am typing this post.

This appears to be a technical glitch, but holy hell. This might sound weird or even ridiculous, but that was really triggering. I was bullied and ostracized when I was really young, and my mind flashed through the awful possibilities and freaked out about losing access to this community.

Anyway, I'm putting this here as a heads up to other users and the mods (I'm going to hit the button to flag this post as soon as I've posted it). I hope the problem can be fixed since I frequently log into the forum from my phone.

Oh no rageasaurus! We'll try to get this sorted quickly.

Thank you!

Oh jeez! I promise you're not banned!

Haha, thanks!

So I tried logging in from my phone again just before falling asleep, and it worked. So it seems to have worked itself out?

I really wish software glitches threw more accurate error messages. I've seen this elsewhere where something goes wrong and the resulting error message sends the person/tech down the wrong rabbit hole. Blerg.

Yes, the error message is pretty misleading, isn't it? I hate that -- earlier today I got an error message that read "Software error." Well, I guess that's nice to know, but it doesn't help me figure out how to avoid throwing the error again.

I just had this error occur to me from my phone. I wasn't connected to WiFi when it happened, so once I got connected, I was able to access the forum again. Just wanted to give the mods a heads up that this still pops up as an issue.

Teabooksandchocolate, thanks for the heads up.

A brief technical explanation:

The thing about IP addresses is that they are often assigned dynamically by internet service providers, meaning that many different people access the internet using the same IP address, though at different times.

Sometimes in the past we have banned people by IP (because some people do have a stable IP / the probability that someone who came from a certain IP once will come via the same IP again is fairly high), but that can lead to other users (probably those using the same internet service provider) accidentally getting the ban message

Given that this has been happening repeatedly, we will re-evalue our use of the IP address ban. We'll keep you posted on our decision.

This is a heads-up that we un-banned all IP addresses. If you receive this kind of error message again, please let us know!