How to Get Banned from TBP

Just kidding; I’m not really going to tell you how to get banned, because that could also tell bad guys how to avoid getting banned. But I’ll say a little about it so it won’t be such a shock if/when it happens to you.

First of all, it’s nothing personal. Neither admin nor I are personally looking at what you do and what you write on the site and subjectively deciding that you should be banned. It’s an entirely mechanical thing that happens automatically based on rules I’ve set up to try to catch ill-intentioned bots and humans attacking the site. These kind of attacks are happening all the time, to every site on the Internet. That’s nothing personal either. There are loads of people out there trying to compromise any server on the Internet that they can (so they can make the server do stuff they want it to do, like compromise more servers, send out spam, host malware, etc). Most of them have no idea whatsoever what the content of TBP is. The vast majority of them have never actually even looked at the site themselves. A material percentage of them don’t speak any english so wouldn’t know what TBP was about even if they did visit – something about oil maybe? — maritime disasters??? This is just the reality of the Internet; there are bad actors out there running automated software that is trying to compromise every server on the Internet. A big part of my job is to try to make the servers I run hard to compromise.

And that’s where the banning rules come in. I periodically review the logs of TBP’s activity, looking for patterns of ‘requests’ (when your web browser asks the server to send it a page, an image, etc. that’s called a ‘request’) that don’t look like normal request patterns for regular folks looking at a website. For example, when the same IP address tries to post 20 different logins to the login page over the course of a minute, I’m pretty sure that’s not normal. Or when the same IP address requests 100 different pages from the site within a couple minutes, I’m also pretty sure that’s not normal human web browsing behavior. There are a lot of other patterns of server abuse that I’ve identified in looking through the logs and I’ve created automated log scanning rules that watch the logs 24/7 and when they see something that looks not right, they just automatically ban the IP address that is doing the not right activity.

Unfortunately, like all dumbass computer code (including every form of AI you have ever seen or heard of…), the rules are not perfect and sometimes there are false positives. Sometimes the false positives are caused by my imperfect code. Sometimes they are caused by you doing something weird or dumb. Sometimes they are caused by bad junk that someone pastes into a post or a comment that then makes your browser do weird things behind the scenes. However it happens, there are times when you, a legitimate human with non-nefarious intentions, may get banned by one of these rules inadvertently. If/when that happens, here’s what you should know:

1. Sorry about that!
2. It’s nothing personal.
3. If you are on a bad TBP jones, you can email admin (make sure to include your IP address in the email) and he’ll let me know and I can manually unban you if I am around at the time.
4. The bans are temporary; most of the ban rules that you guys trip accidentally will only ban your IP address for a couple hours, so worst case: go watch a football game or weed your garden and when you are done with that, come back and all will be well.