403 Forbidden Error PSA

[Maypews]

For the last little while, a few users have reported encountering a 403 forbidden error when attempting to access the website. Thanks to DrSchnautz I believe (not 100% yet) I have finally determined the cause of this; it was being caused by our bot defense mechanism. The way said mechanism works is by creating a few new webpages that normal end users would never access (honeypots), and putting them in the inspect element code. Since scrapers scrape the entire website, the idea is that they'd go to those pages and be blocked while end users would be unaffected.

Unfortunately it seems that innocent user IPs were somehow being caught in the crossfire as well in spite of none of the users having clicked on the honeypot links. Now our site would quickly turn into The Scraped if I disabled it outright, and I do not want to setup Cuckflare or Anoobis. So I've set the block time to only last for a day, and I will on occasion clean out the blocked IPs. If you end up experiencing this issue, you can either wait a day or email me and I'll clean out the blocklist (no guarantees on which will come first).

[Maypews]

Oh, I forgot to mention this in the OP, but there were also issues pertaining to UBlock Origin. So if you're using that and start experiencing difficulties accessing the site, it's worth trying to disable it. We have no ads or trackers anyway. That being said, I don't think this was the main cause but figured it was worth mentioning.

[NonoEnjoyer]

NECROING this as a post test.

[Steve]

once again being mistaken for a bot im just that good