Why do I have to use a proxy browser?

Subject: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: GUEST,Merrick
Date: 21 Aug 14 - 04:39 PM

I can never get to this web site using my regular browser. The screen says 'bonk'. I have to use a proxy. Has my ISP been blocked or is there some other reason?

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 21 Aug 14 - 06:06 PM

There's no telling without more information. What is your regular IP address? This site will tell you.

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: GUEST,.gargoyle
Date: 21 Aug 14 - 06:35 PM

At times in the past
And it appears.....
..................................................times in the very near future..... I have required a proxy for Mudcat.

Sincerely,
Gargoyle

I expect removal of postings because "I do not toe-the-party-line".

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: Stanron
Date: 21 Aug 14 - 07:02 PM

OK, I'll bite. What's a proxy?

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: GUEST,Merrick
Date: 21 Aug 14 - 08:06 PM

I don't think I want to post my computer's number thank you.

A proxy server can get you to a web site when you can't connect direct. My computer won't connect to this one unless I send the request thru a proxy browsing service. Sucks. If I didn't know about proxies I wouldn't be able to open this site. Usally that happens because of censorship but this is just a music site. Why do I get that bonk thing? Has my service provider been banned? Wouldn't that restrict a bunch of other people in my area from getting to the site too?

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 21 Aug 14 - 08:27 PM

Then post just the first set of numbers in the sequence and I can see if any in that range are blocked.

A proxy server is like a virtual tunnel to send your data through in order to hide your own IP address or to get around being blocked.

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: Stanron
Date: 21 Aug 14 - 09:00 PM

Merrick, what's your platform? PC, phone or tablet or what? Have you tried other browsers? Mudcat has, in the past, been rather slow and can time out before a page loads but that hasn't happened to me for a while now.

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: GUEST,Merrick
Date: 21 Aug 14 - 09:13 PM

No everything is up to speed. This is blocking. Thats what I thought. I guess if my neighbors want to look up song lyrics they're just out of luck here because of the blocking. There should be a policy against that. No blocking, period. Where's another good web site to look up song lyrics? One that doesn't censor?

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 21 Aug 14 - 10:22 PM

People aren't generally blocked unless they are trolls. Food for thought?

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: GUEST,.gargoyle
Date: 21 Aug 14 - 10:46 PM

The Silly River Stage is the last of Mudcat' s abusive moderators. This stage shall soon pass.

Sincerely,
Gargoyle

for some very peculiar reason, posts by gargoyles are being removed. The most recent deletion was within the past two hours, to this thread regarding ISP addresses and headers.

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: Jeri
Date: 21 Aug 14 - 11:02 PM

It was a completely blank post, garg.

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: Mysha
Date: 22 Aug 14 - 04:12 AM

Hi,

It says "Bonk"?? What kind of standard response is "Bonk"? If you were properly blocked by a website, I expect you'd get "403 Forbidden" as a return from the server. So, how did you determine where this curious message comes from?

A proxy server is a server that is addressed in the stead of the intended one, with the proxy then addressing the intended server. This works two ways: The server of the site doesn't see the IP-address of your computer, and your computer and local network and provider don't see the address of the site. Thus, you can access a site even if your IP-address has been banned because someone who uses that address, or sometimes one near it, has been misbehaving. And the other way round, you can access a site that your local network or provider blocks because they don't like it.

In my experience, when there's a reason to yell "censorship", it usually has to do with local blocking, rather than blocking on the server. YMMV

Bye
                                                               Mysha

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 22 Aug 14 - 04:12 AM

years ago a couple of Ozcatters couldn't get into Mudcat - it appears Australia's largest ISP was banned by Mudcat's host???? (I can't find the details) cos one/some of its millions of clients was/were spamming. Joe & a very techy Ozcatter sorted it out, but we had to visit the Cat via proxies for a while (courtesy of the techy Ozcatter).

or something like that - as I wrote, I can't remember the exact details

sandra

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: Mysha
Date: 22 Aug 14 - 04:27 AM

Hi,

A good example, Sandra:

  This is how information ought to go:
  Mudcat <-------------> Mudhost <---------------> Ozprovider <---------------> Ozcatter
  
  This is what actually happened:
  Mudcat <-------------> Mudhost XXXXX-----------> Ozprovider <---------------> Ozcatter
  
  This is a work-around with a proxy:
  Mudcat <-------------> Mudhost <---> proxy <---> Ozprovider <---------------> Ozcatter
  

Since the proxy pretends the information is coming from the proxy itself, the host and provider next to it would have no idea they were really talking to eachother, hence no blocking would take place.

Bye
                                                               Mysha

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 22 Aug 14 - 04:43 AM

Well, it's a question we can't answer without knowing the person's IP number. I can't blame the person for not wanting to post that IP on a public forum. But if they obtain their IP and send it to me by e-mail, I'll do my best to come up with an answer.
IP Checker: http://www.whatismyip.com/.

-Joe Offer, Mudcat contact person, registrar, and music editor-
[e-mail]

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 22 Aug 14 - 10:09 AM

Gargoyle, you don't have a dog in this fight. No one has blocked you, you have been invited back. In looking around I'd guess your deleted threads are only about 1/3 of your output now. Not bad considering a dozen years ago almost everything you posted was deleted.

Send the IP to Joe and let him research it. There is no answer until we know where someone is posting from.

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: Jeri
Date: 22 Aug 14 - 10:42 AM

Gargoyle's deleted posts are far, far fewer than 1/3 of his output, even when he doesn't call himself ".gargoyle". Some of them were deleted because they were blank, too. He used to go after katlaughing regularly, and I stopped deleting that type of message when kat asked me to.

The elephant in this particular room is "Songwronger". I'm not bothered by him not being able to start trolling thread after trolling thread, as he seems to have wandered in from some nut-job site elsewhere on the internet, and decided to stay, thanks to our resident welcoming committee of troll-groupies. Although I think he had a different name back then.

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: GUEST,Merrick
Date: 23 Aug 14 - 01:53 PM

I e-mailed a neighbor that uses the same company as me and she can't access the web site directly either. So that would be blanket banning. Is this a European web site with hate sppeech concerns? I don't know if I've ever seen an American operation do this. Why would you block people from searching your lyric database?

There seems to be a lot of hostility here on the part of the moderators towards the users. Surely a better system can be set up.

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: GUEST,.gargoyle
Date: 23 Aug 14 - 07:40 PM

I have been pushing this insight...to overload...in the last 12 months.

chilling effects

(it is a website run by Google) punch in anything ... i.e. ISP, or "sound track" or "group" or "song" and discover .... WHO has requested the block, and sometimes .... hundreds of alternate "back doors".



Sincerely,
Gargoyle

The more "someone" attempts to block....the more ..... is the challenge. I understand why Mudcat removed postings in another thread regarding the USA and Black/Brown/Yellow observations.

Sincerely,
Gargoyle

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: GUEST,.gargoyle
Date: 24 Aug 14 - 05:19 PM

There are MANY other forums than MUDCAT.

Sincerely,
Gargoyle

Their gain will be my loss.

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: GUEST,Rahere
Date: 24 Aug 14 - 06:20 PM

I'm half wondering if it's those self-appointed censors SpamHaus doing it, or something like it. I recently found I couldn't send mails to my own daughter because she's with Yahoo who were using that brick-built outhouse of a vetter, and the said bunch of kiteheads had identified my ISP as a source of spam and blacklisted them. Which is hardly urprising as they are 1&1, one of the world's biggest, hosting no end not only of their own mail, but mail from their customers systems. So, for the third time this year, we found our mail cut because of something beyond our control.
Given that 1&1's own spam filters uniquely manage to intercept real mail and misses all the junk, I think they're on a loser all round.

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: Bill D
Date: 24 Aug 14 - 06:36 PM

static versus dynamic IPs

If I understand it right, many IPs are dynamic, and are assigned within a range each time one signs on. If a site wishes/needs to block serious spam or trolls, they are usually able to only block the range. This can catch the innocents who live near them or share the same IP range.

If the mods knew the basic range, they could check & see if & when that range was blocked.

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 24 Aug 14 - 06:50 PM

A lot of internet services distrust Yahoo, with good reason. For a while Gmail sent all mail I got from users on Yahoo to my spam folder (and they were probably right to do that).

Some UK users may have a particular problem here because BTInternet farmed out their email service to Yahoo a few months ago. The result was that BTInternet users had their email service instantly go from awful to disastrous. But I don't think HTTP traffic from BTInternet goes through Yahoo, not yet anyway.

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 24 Aug 14 - 07:43 PM

A wild guess here, that the range starts with 108.

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 24 Aug 14 - 08:10 PM

Nobody's e-mailed me for help resolving problems being blocked at Mudcat. If they don't contact me and don't send me their IP addresses, I can't help them.

Moat of the blocks we have in place, are to prevent Spam posts. Sometimes, legitimate posts are also affected by those Spam blocks. But if people with problems don't give us the information we need, we can't help.

-Joe-
[e-mail]

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: GUEST,Tech.
Date: 25 Aug 14 - 08:32 AM

"Some UK users may have a particular problem here because BTInternet farmed out their email service to Yahoo a few months ago. The result was that BTInternet users had their email service instantly go from awful to disastrous."

BT made Yahoo their portal and email service many years ago. They are now in the process of changing people over from Yahoo to their new email partner Openwave Messaging. Just to correct you Jack Campin Yahoo are not the problem.

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 25 Aug 14 - 09:46 AM

Let me put it another way. Email via BT has gone from bad to worse to dogshit. They repeatedly turn off my email and demand that I change my password and other security details because of alleged "suspicious activity" and tell me to run security software. Well I run three security suites and scan daily and I can trace no such activity - but they will not tell me what the bad activity is so I cannot look more closely to see whether something I want to do is not what BT want me to do. They won't even tell me if I phone support, at vast expense. AVOID!

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: GUEST,punkfolkrocker
Date: 25 Aug 14 - 09:47 AM

I'll not mince words - The new BTinternet email service is SHIT.

The previous service was not that bad really. But this new one is dreadful.

Every couple of days I have to trawl through over a hundred new emails
because, although senders can be ticked as spam,
the system totally disregards this and still sends nearly all new mesages to the in-box.

To compound the problems, the navigation from one message to another
has been made infuriatingly slow and inefficient.

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: GUEST
Date: 25 Aug 14 - 10:52 AM

"although senders can be ticked as spam,
the system totally disregards this and still sends nearly all new mesages to the in-box. "

Trouble is that so many numpties use the "report as spam" function on their email rather than unsubscribe from mailing lists that they signed up for.

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: GUEST,punkfolkrocker
Date: 25 Aug 14 - 11:06 AM

Ok GUEST - checking the spam 'box'
for unwanted senders worked quite effectively with BTinternet's previous, recently depated, system.

The new system just fails to work properly at all.

{unless, there's a very well hidden system setting somewhere,
activating the spam filters to actually do what they are already supposed to be be doing default ???]

Yes of course I can unsubsribe from reputable 'known' mailers if I want to.

I am only to happy to get shot of the likes of BHS, Matalan, Isme, etc..

But what about the dozens of daily garbled English language spam shite
I never willingly signed up for.

.. yeah sure , if there is an unsubscribe checkbox in any of them,
I'm bound to want to risk ticking it...
and seeing what happens next....???

Subject: RE: Why do I have to use a proxy browser?
From: GUEST
Date: 26 Aug 14 - 08:49 AM

"
Yes of course I can unsubsribe from reputable 'known' mailers if I want to."
You can but too many people use the spam button.

Spam reporting isn't just about your account, its about identifying who to block for everybody. Your provider isn't going to blacklist somebody just on your say so.

If YOU want to block a particular sender then you block the address or the sender's domain.

Oh, and do check your spam filter settings, if there has been an upgrade or other change then they may have been reset. That shouldn't happen but it does.