TexasCHLforum.com

The Annoyed Man wrote: ↑Thu Nov 17, 2022 10:13 am Now it’s happening to me, and it has to do with my VPN (Nord). It used to be that if I was connected through an IP address outside of Texas, I couldn’t get in. As of this morning, it’s not even letting me in if I log in from a Dallas IP address (I live in DFW). If I turn my VPN off, then I can get in. I already don’t post here as often as I used to. Not sure I want to keep posting if I have to turn off my VPN just to do so.

Turning it back on now…bye…

I can't speak about what sort of filtering measures the forum may have in place, but something similar happened to me before, also using NordVPN, with a few websites that used the blacklists published by stopforumspam.com and another from spamrats.com. There are others.

But the unfortunate thing about those blacklists is that they may have been a viable internet security tactic a decade ago, but not now. They rely on crowdsourced, mostly manual reporting, and if reports are received for multiple IP addresses within a given CIDR range, they can blacklist a range. By some accounts, about one-third of all internet users--especially with suite providers like Norton and McAfee including VPN services in their offerings--now use VPNs to access the internet. The old block-IP-address model simply isn't practical any longer.

Like I said, I don't know if the forum authenticates any blacklists like that, but that might be at the root of the problem. And it can be difficult to diagnose because it's transitory. Entries on those blacklists roll on and roll off.

Something you might want to try--and this is specific to NordVPN, something they evidently don't like to reveal because I gather they don't have a really good handle on it--is to go into the settings and change the connection protocol.

With the NordVPN desktop application open, click the "gear" icon to go into settings; then go to "Connection"; the top option should be "VPN Protocol." By default it's going to be "Auto," which will attempt to use their proprietary NordLynx protocol. Try changing that to "OpenVPN (UDP)". Everything still functions the same way as far as connecting and disconnecting goes, but the backend routing (and protocol, of course) changes.

I discovered this by accident because I was getting absolutely terrible speeds through NordVPN. On my ISP service which gives me averages of 290 Mbps down and 25 Mbps up, I was getting 3 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up with the VPN active. No bueno. Changing the protocol setting netted me about 98 Mbps down and 14 Mbps up. Much more tolerable. And it seems to have--consistently for the past month, anyway--helped cure the blacklist issues I was having. I still wish .gov sites and sites like Wikipedia didn't screen out most VPN users, but it is what it is.

Man; I never even thought of that. I'm just too used to sites forcing SSL redirect if they have a certificate, which most do nowadays. I just thought TXCHL didn't have a cert so never tried it.

I'm kinda betting it remembers me next time I come back.

I described my problem with it (Windows 10 + Chrome, two machines, plus a Chromebook) after the first major outage but before the last, including some steps at diagnostics. Still happening exactly the same way. If I close the browser tab, I have to log-on again. If I keep the forum open in a browser tab, after about two or three hours of inactivity it logs me off.

It isn't a massive problem, but I do find myself visiting the forum much less often because of it. I'm not a fan of password management systems, and I always use very strong passwords, and never the same password twice. So it is a bit of a pain having to reauthenticate constantly. But on the bright side, the forum is working!