Access Denied - GoDaddy Website Firewall

[Boggy Man]

Lately, as I began working on editing drafts of my first adventure, I am suddenly starting to find that trying to access any parts of this site, such as the board index, or unread posts, or some of my other postings for reference, regularly but erratically (happens at least once a night) results in nothing loading, and it timing out, like it used to do during the Denial Of Service attacks. After a number of timeouts, I finally get a GoDaddy Security page, part of which says:

Block ID: TMP021
Block reason: Your IP address was temporarily blocked by our IDS.

It takes me around 20 minutes for things to finally be functional again, which is a pain, especially when it is just past midnight, I saved the latest version of my draft, refreshed the New Posts page, and all I wanted to do was check unread posts, logout of the forum, close my browser, shut down my computer and go to bed, only to have to wait around 20 minutes to do that! I never seemed to have this problem until I started editing drafts and deleting old ones. In fact, tonight, after loading my latest draft, I then decided to post this problem to this Technical forum first thing. But, when I tried to open the board index in a new tab so I could go to the Technical forum, once again, the long wait with a number of timeouts before the GoDaddy page came up again, and finally, shortly afterward, access to the site again (I passed the time by doing more editing of my adventure draft), and am now able to post this problem here.

[dlodoski]

Sorry to hear you've been struggling with the board.

In the midst of The Outage we had a while back, I was sold a site security package by a call center guy who made it seem like he would pass me on to second level support (yea, he got me). The GoDaddy firewall is part of that package. It's not the firewall I want to use in the long run.

There's no point in getting into too much detail at this point. We took a big outage, and I'm ok with the way things are for now (even though I am also paying monthly for the firewall that not being used). When I have proper time and energy, I will try to switch the the preferred firewall.

Meanwhile, I suggest clearing out your cookies and looking at how many simultaneous connections your browser may be trying to open. Whatever you are doing is likely being seen as excessively chattery.

Is anyone else having any issues like this?

[Boggy Man]

Things are rather crazy. I can log on, browse all the forums, and download stuff, and everything goes perfectly well with no problems. But, if I so much as delete or save a draft, then the issue starts plaguing me again.

[Fred588]

Things are rather crazy. I can log on, browse all the forums, and download stuff, and everything goes perfectly well with no problems. But, if I so much as delete or save a draft, then the issue starts plaguing me again.

This is only a wild guess but if the issue only involves drafts and only you I would hypothesize it has to do with where you drafts are stored. Almost certainly there is some limit set to the amount of memory used for drafts. Could you be exceeding that?

[Boggy Man]

Things are rather crazy. I can log on, browse all the forums, and download stuff, and everything goes perfectly well with no problems. But, if I so much as delete or save a draft, then the issue starts plaguing me again.

This is only a wild guess but if the issue only involves drafts and only you I would hypothesize it has to do with where you drafts are stored. Almost certainly there is some limit set to the amount of memory used for drafts. Could you be exceeding that?

If it was a draft storage limitation, then deleting drafts, which frees up space, shouldn't trigger the issue, but it does.

[Boggy Man]

Well, I can add another trigger to the list - trying to upload too many attachments at once. I used to be able to upload up to 5 attachments at once without any problems, but when I tried uploading a batch of 4 photos for the first part of my first adventure (it was broken into 3 parts), it stalled, and when I tried accessing the "New posts" page, it wouldn't load, and then would timeout, and after a number of timeouts, followed by the GoDaddy message that kept coming up (and http errors where I was trying to upload the photos), after around 20 minutes, I was able to finally access the site again, and then uploaded the photos one at a time with no problem, and was able to finally post my first adventure of the year!

[micky3277]

Clicking open too many threads simultaneously causes the same problem. I use a browser plugin called LinkClump that lets simultaneously open a bunch of threads in separate tabs which I use to more quickly catch up on unread posts. I cannot use it here anymore because it trips the firewall. If you utilize a VPN, a quick workaround is to disconnect your VPN and reconnect through a different server.

[Boggy Man]

Well, now I found out that even searching through threads full of photos for a particular posting also triggers the GoDaddy IP address blockage. I was trying to find one or more of my late season adventure postings from 2012 to see what conditions were like in late September and early October to get an idea what things might be like at this time of year, to help decide whether or not to attempt an outing with sinking for Oct 5'th (appointments and truck unavailability kept postponing target dates). But, I could only check a couple of pages before getting blocked, having to wait 20 to 25 minutes to regain access, resuming the search by clicking a couple more links to pages in the thread, getting blocked again, and waiting another 20 to 25 minutes for access again, before finally finding the postings I wanted. It turns out Sept 30'th had light frost in the shadows when I arrived there which quickly vanished, and on October 10'th, my bog had a frozen crust on top when I got there, which quickly thawed out in the sun, details from 2012 making me decide that perhaps I shouldn't bother with this time of the year, even though we have been experiencing summerlike temperatures of around 25˚C (77˚F) in the valley, but then there is the fact it is hunting season. I started searching the thread before midnight, and finished the search around 12:45 am, a search that should have taken less than a minute to complete!

I haven't tried it out, but I wonder if searching through a number of pages in other picture/photo heavy threads could result in the same IP blockage.

[dlodoski]

I haven't tried it out, but I wonder if searching through a number of pages in other picture/photo heavy threads could result in the same IP blockage.

If you can provide me with a stable IP address (via PM), I can add it to the firewall white list.

[Boggy Man]

I haven't tried it out, but I wonder if searching through a number of pages in other picture/photo heavy threads could result in the same IP blockage.

If you can provide me with a stable IP address (via PM), I can add it to the firewall white list.

PM sent. Thank you very much!