Message for Hamish and other Story Page, Story Forum & Pfhorums staff specifically:
Since the so-called "online safety act" i.e. Internet Censorship & Surveillance Bill passed in my region (the UK) last year as well as copycats in other places like Australia & the united states, many if not all of us have turned to VPNs to bypass it so we can continue to use the true internet unmolested e.g. without being forced to dox ourselves to the IRL counterparts of the Pfhor.
However, this does sometimes have the very annoying side effect of certain sites mistaking how a user's traffic when using a VPN works as potentially a botnet or something like could be used in a DDOS attack, so they temporarily block access until either exactly when they turn it off or several minutes to an hour after doing so.
This site (regular Story Page & this forum) and the Pfhorums suffer from this glitch, which can make it hard if not impossible for us British users to even load the site without exposing ourselves and letting the block timer run out if our VPN was active before: It can even trigger if the site isn't being visited but the VPN is on, as I found out a few minutes ago when after being elsewhere for a while with the tab closed, I paused my AV's VPN feature before returning to try & avoid the bug. It's turned off completely right now until I'm away again as I didn't want to take a chance.
Around Spring this year the VPN bug made reading my old Tour of Duty entries for both Marathon, Halo & System Shock harder, including trying to load the list of each entry I'd made on the Pfhorums to find them easier. When I can finally have time to do writeups again such as more Halo alongside Viking and comparisons of older & newer Eternal builds (plus a token System Shock R series for the Tour spinoff comparing Marathon & System Shock I did), it's gonna make posting the entries really damn hard.
Would it be possible and/or easy for both sites' code to be updated to allow VPN users the same access as unprotected users while still filtering out actual malicious activity etc. that those failsafes are supposed to be blocking?
If it isn't possible, I'd like to know exactly why but I'd otherwise totally understand as not everything is that simple.
