Access issues experienced by BT (British Telecom) customers in the UKSeveral U.K. Members have reported being presented with ‘challenge’ pages presenting a puzzle or question, before they can visit the Forum recently. All Members reporting these issues are also customers of BT.
Most ISP’s (including BT) use shared (or 'dynamic') IP addresses for their customer connections. This means when you switch on your modem, BT allocates you an IP address (such as 86.123.648.23) from a pool of available numbers. However, five minutes before you switched on your modem, another BT customer may have been using that same IP address. If that customer happened to be a spammer or malware distributor his IP address may have been chronicled in various databases tracking people who behave badly on the Web.
We have two levels of anti-spam/malware systems protecting douglasmotorcycles.net – Cloudflare and our own system designed specifically for the forum software.
CloudflareCloudflare is a worldwide network of servers that duplicate the website in real time. It speeds up access and provides a backup if the primary server is down.
It also pre-filters spammers/malware distributors and reduces the chance of bad things happening on the website.
Our Own SystemIt checks visitors on several parameters including their IP address. If any of these parameters have been previously used by spammers/malware operators, it will either present a complete block or a challenge page with a question or puzzle.
The Access IssuesSo it seems that one or more BT customers (not our Forum Members) have been posting malware around the Web and the IP addresses used have been chronicled in anti-spam/malware databases. Then when our Members try to connect using these same IP addresses, the anti-spam systems present the challenge pages.
What can be doneFollowing a report this week from one of our UK/BT Members, I have completely disabled the Cloudflare service. So that part is now out of the system.
The second system, local to our Forum, is much harder to deal with. It has been incredibly successful in reducing (to near zero) the amount of spam and malicious posts that get made on our Forum. To disable it completely would open the floodgates and create a large amount of manual work detecting and deleting malicious posts. BT has a huge number of IP addresses in its shared pool and I doubt whether it will be possible to allow all these unchallenged access, but I am looking at this possibility.
So what can be done?
While we try to figure out a solution at this end, here are some things that you can do to help
1) Request a dedicated (or 'static') IP address from BT. This is an IP address that is permanently allocated to you and you only. However some searching suggests this may only be available to BT business customers, and not BT residential customers. Please see
http://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/providers/bt/bt-broadband-fixed-ipBT suggest Plusnet Broadband (
https://www.plus.net/) as an ISP who offers static IP addresses. Plusnet information on static IP's can be found here -
http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/products/IP_addresses_broadband.shtml 2) Another option is to leave your modem switched on permanently. If your current IP address is allowing smooth access to the Forum, just leave it switched on and you will retain the same IP address. This connection may be interrupted by a power outage or maintenance by the ISP. However, it will slow down the whole rotation of IP addresses and therefore the number of times you connect via a bad IP address. A modem typically draws about 5-10 watts of power.
3) If you do encounter a challenge page, visit “What is My IP?” (
www.whatismyip.com) to find out the bad IP address. Then disconnect, wait a few minutes and connect again. You will most likely connect via a different IP address.
4) Post the bad IP address here so we build up knowledge of the range of problem addresses and perhaps it will help us find a solution.
5) Call BT and explain the problem. Ask them to take the offending IP address out of circulation and step up their efforts to track down malware distributors.
6) If they are unresponsive, consider a possible change of ISP.
If anyone would like assistance with anything concerning access to the Forum, please contact me via email or PM by clicking on one of the small icons in the left hand column.
Dave
