Are you unexpectedly seeing a notice that you have been banned? Are you using a VPN?

Titillating

Expert
Ambassador
Hey folks,

You may or may not know (because I like to think we keep it pretty well hidden), but the moderation team has been fighting a war with spammers behind the scenes for a few months now. In the process of that, we've banned a seemingly endless number of IP addresses associated with certain VPNs, which the spammers were using to bypass many of our efforts.

We've made some good progress in our little war lately, but many IP addresses remain banned and we're not ready to lift them just yet. There are still precautions and backup plans to put into place.

If you use a VPN and you are unable to use the forums because you are banned, you can easily get around this by not using your VPN when trying to access the site or by cycling your VPN to get a new IP address assigned. Should you continue to experience problems after that, please get in touch with somebody on the moderation team or contact us at community@tomshardware.com



Thanks,

Kevin Ng
Assistant Community Manager
 

Cypher7

Honorable
May 7, 2014
19
0
10,520
Thanks for posting this Kevin. I was using the forum with a VPN for months and today started getting "You are banned" messages out of the blue. Turned off VPN and everything is fine.
 

Den_3_

Commendable
Aug 25, 2016
1
0
1,510
I got the following notification when I actively used the proxy servers. Try to change the provider, or proxy settings.