I usually haunt firearms forums. Back in March/April, I joined a forum I hadn’t seen before – Springfield Armory Forums.
Between March and now I’d posted only once, in which a moderator welcomed me (I didn’t comment back). That was my only post. I usually just read the comments.
Early October, I tried to visit and couldn’t – the website wasn’t allowing me to log in. I reached out to the admins and they informed me that I’d been banned. There was no real indication that I was banned when attempting to log into the site, other than the fact that I couldn’t log in. It was really weird.
When the admins replied back, they asked me to provide some information for a ban appeal. I told them that I wasn’t going to appeal anything, as I didn’t initially know I was banned and had no idea why. I informed them that I didn’t like that at all. They removed the ban and told me to not post anything but text for a few weeks so that the system could “learn”. It appears they may be using some type of machine learning. Maybe the ML logic screwed up?
I haven’t been to the site since then, until today – I asked that they delete my account. I don’t trust anything about that site or their admins at this point.
As well, I only just now remembered that I’ve been using a VPN when browsing the internet. I’m thinking that may be why they banned me. There are many folks that think VPN usage is suspect activity. I don’t understand this line of thinking – a VPN is a network tool. It’s only malicious when you abuse it by using it to dodge a ban or hide your identity when doing something bad. I’ve not been doing anything malicious or been dodging bans.
When I first started using the VPN, Reddit also locked my account. When I asked them why, they didn’t provide an answer but I suspect they saw the different IPs my systems were using to connect to Reddit and thought it was suspicious. Also, many sites outright block IPs that VPN pools use, even if a person is not violating terms of service. Reputation-based monitoring by itself is bad, IMO, because an IP that was banned/blocked 3 years ago is more than likely OK to use in present times.