Banned in BC?

I am up in Tofino, BC on vacation and thought for the first week that the trip reports forum was down. The rest of the site was fine but the forum was giving me a "sorry, Guest [or my user name] you are banned from using this forum."

I just got onto my work VPN which puts me in the states as far as TAY can tell and everything is fine- except for the part where the time for August turns is slipping away, but that is my problem...

Just wondering, are all BC IPs banned, or just this ISP? or just Vancouver Island? Not that I would protest, no need to have these surfer hippies coming down to steal our suncupped, bug ridden stashes, but I am technically curious.

I get the same behavior from my in-law's house in Idaho. I think it is their specific connection that is banned b/c I can connect from nearby connections supplied by the same ISP. Perhaps there is a list of addresses from which spam has originated or something like that. The situation has been this way for several years.

I did get denied from at least two different IPs/households. This is in a very small end-of-the-road community with one ISP.

I did see a few PCs in a coffee shop that were available to rent that looked, from the cruft left on the desktops, to be something like a skid-row hooker version of a computer.

Since the main site worked and it was just the forum, I guess that is a happy medium since we don't have a commercial site or well-paid admin staff.

It did look like there is a non-internetty branch of TAY-ers there, I saw some skis being unloaded from a plane that looked to have been coming back from a glacier tour. They have snow closer to town than us, but a lot less road access.

Way late here, been on vacation for a couple of weeks. There are a series of bans based on a number of different settings - IP, ISP, domain, etc - that have been in place for a while based on spam addresses that signed up with those attributes. They've been in place for years and every once in a while a random "banned spot" will show up for a regular user. Feel free to contact me and I can try to troubleshoot it. Sounds like this was a short-term thing for you though.

Marcus,

Thanks for the reply! I will check again the next time I am up that way and follow up.

Jon