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Ask HN: my IP seems to be banned on HN, now what?

10 points by CWIZO ↗ HN
It seems my IP was banned by Hacker News somehow. I haven't done anything malicious or posted anything that would get me banned. I am however working on a small chrome extension for HN and I did refresh HN quite often. Other than that I had the "Hacker face" (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackerface/daljejehnbbbhjlecjgafnnfgilbkdhj) extension installed, which I've now uninstalled. Other than that I don't have any extension installed that would trigger automated requests to HN (my extension makes no requests).

What can I do? I'd really like go get back on HN :)

ps: I'm able to use my account and browse HN if I VPN into my office ...

pps: my IP is: 89 212 118 68

edit: I get this when I try to open the page in Chrome: Error 324 (net::ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE): The server closed the connection without sending any data.

8 comments

[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 29.3 ms ] thread
kalleboo
I was IP banned for editing a post too many times too quickly in succession. I guess that made me look like a spambot. The ban dropped automatically after a week.

You could also try emailing pg.

CWIZO
I'll do that if this thread doesn't resolve it (and after one week has passed, I really don't want't to bother people over this kind of things).
Danieru
I once got banned for hit F5 too much during a noprocrast lock out. The ban lasted until I waited a full day without visiting HN.

The exact message I got was that the server sent an invalid message to the reverse proxy.

evx
I had the exact same issue as well. And I'm working on a hacker news Chrome extension as well which caused me to refresh too many times. The blocking doesn't seem to be time limited. I restart my router which assigns me a new IP.

For development, you can copy some hacker news sample pages and put on a local server and edit your hosts file and use your fake local hacker news (at least for the parts that is possible) then you can refresh as much as you like.

I hope people behind Hacker News give us some details about how things work so we can adjust the extensions, etc...

lobster_johnson
HN has an automatic banning system that looks at frequent requesters, and in my opinion it's set way too strict.

I got banned as well. In fact, for about five months I got banned about every 14 days, apparently for incurring short bursts of about 4 reqs/sec according to the server logs.

The fact that such a ban simply closes the server connection is pretty weird and unfriendly. For a long time I thought HN was simply down.

Eventually I sat down to search for the cause, and traced the problem to Reeder, the app I use to read HN on my Mac, was trying to auto-discover HN's site icons. It would look for a certain Apple-standardized icon name, and then load the front page if that failed. (When I informed Paul Graham of the cause and solution, he curtly told me to stop emailing him.)

In my opinion the system needs to be improved. The system ought to return a properly formatted HTTP response, and triggering the system should not immediately ban a user for a whole week. I would suggest a gradual system where you initially enter grace period of a few minutes (where the system might reply with "you're loading pages too fast, please try again in a minute") and only ban your IP if you don't honour the grace period.

kintamanimatt
Why is it that every time I read about emails from PG they're always described as curt, snappy, rude, or something similar? It's puzzling because he otherwise seems like a nice guy.
eshvk
To offer a data point from the other side of the hyperplane: I remember emailing PG way back in 2009 for some advice on grad school. He was polite, to the point and helpful.