unterwulf wrote on 2023-05-26, 10:12:

Hi, […]
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Hi,

A couple years ago I made a bot for me and my friends, which visits a number of downgrade sites once per 15 minutes, collects any updates and posts them into a telegram channel (https://t.me/oldhuborgnews). Yesterday VOGONS started to block the bot from accessing the site, presumably by its IP. I just wanted to know if the bot violates some policy and was banned intentionally. IMHO, the bot did nothing wrong and once in 15 minutes doesn't sound like a huge stress for any server.

I already excluded vogons.org from the list of sites the bot visits, but I really hate doing this. I'd love to hear adminstration's postion on this. Since it was ok for years I hope that the bot was banned unintentionally or it's a some kind of mistake.

Thanks!

No idea if Vogons has banned your IP but I'm all for Vogons banning the chat bots active on the forum.

Perhaps your bot got banned by mistake in some chat bot ban wave.

Contact an admin by PM as per the terms and conditions page:

8. You won’t try to hack or disrupt the site or its members, or bypass moderation of your account. (If you discover a security problem, please send a private message to a VOGONS administrator straight away. We will fix the problem and give you credit.)

Unrelated to the ban issue, but... why did you write an entire bot to scrape for updates when you could've just subscribed to the Atom feed? That's its sole raison d'etre after all.

elszgensa wrote on 2023-05-26, 20:11:

why did you write an entire bot to scrape for updates when you could've just subscribed to the Atom feed?

Well, there are other sites in the list which are scraped as well and some of them aren't nice enough to provide their updates using atom or RSS. But yes, you are right, it's probably worth switching to parsing atom/RSS where possible to avoid necessity of updating the parser whenever website's markup is changing.

Nevertheless, I still prefer to consume the updates using Telegram, so an RSS reader of any kind is not an option for me. It's just a matter of taste.

Vogons.org especially ban google translate service ip, so no one foreign users can't translate anything using it.

Not sure if it's the thread what helped, but as of today VOGONS isn't blocking my bot anymore. Thanks to everyone involved!

unterwulf wrote on 2023-05-31, 19:23:

Not sure if it's the thread what helped, but as of today VOGONS isn't blocking my bot anymore. Thanks to everyone involved!

I'm guessing it is some kind of automatic thing? I actually found myself staring at a message that I was banned last night (permaban) and I was like "uhh..what just happened here?". I did plan on sending a message to the admins right then since I don't even do anything even remotely illegal (I knew it was probably some kind of mistake, at worst my account had been compromised or something) so I wasn't too worried tbh, but since it was close to 2 am and I was tired, I decided to wait it out till next morning just to see the issue has already fixed (thanks! ^^).

It did point me to an IP address but this was on a different continent for some reason. Maybe it just glitched or something? I don't know but I'd still prefer this over having to roll with tides of wave after wave of annoying spambots or something.

Is IP banning even a thing?
Most people get dynamic IP addresses from their ISP which changes every once in a while (from hours up to a couple of days).
Or if we go even further, most ISPs these days, especially cellphone providers put their users behind NAT by default and you have to specifically ask and sometimes pay for a dynamic public IP address and always pay for a static one.