There's a good chance that you got caught in the cross fire when someone else got banned.
Greetings SRFers:
As many of you know, the SRF mod team is continually working to keep SRF as the #1 SRO fan forum on the internet today. Part of how we do that is the periodic banning of spam bots, problem users, and those who break the forum rules.
When an account on SRF is banned, it is done both through username and IP address. Most users only access SRF in one or two different places, for example home and the office or at school, and hence have very few IP addresses.
However, many ISPs assign dynamic IP addresses to computers every time they access the internet, or change IP addresses daily, weekly, or even hourly. This means that every time a SRF user who uses such an ISP posts here, there is a wide range of IPs that they could be posting from.
This is normally not a problem unless that user becomes banned. When a user with a large list of IP addresses gets banned, the admins have to either ban each IP individually - which can take an extremely long time - or ban IPs in a range. For example, if a user had the following IP addresses:
171.21.64.108
171.21.65.7
171.21.38.220
171.21.34.162
their IPs could be banned by simply adding 171.21.*.* to the ban list. This saves the admin staff time and energy to better serve the community.
The problem is that sometimes innocent users are caught up in these mass IP bans when they did nothing wrong. If you suddenly cannot access SRF from a place that you normally could and don't believe you have done anything to warrant a ban, follow the steps below:
1. Go to
http://www.whatismyipaddress.com and find out the IP of the computer from which you are banned.
2. PM one of the moderators, or me directly.
3. In your PM, include your IP address and explain that you were banned accidentally.
4. We will work to get your issue resolved as soon as possible.
We apologize for the inconvenience this must cause our users and hope to keep these cases to a minimum.
-The SRF Staff
NOTE: The staff checks into every ban lift request and cross-references names, IPs, and ISPs with known banned problem users. If you think you will get your IP ban lifted after being banned from here for rules violations by attempting to abuse this system, you are sorely mistaken.
