Administrative, Technology and Society

Commenting Problem

7 Comments

A regular commenter writes:

I’ve been blocked from commenting on your site for weeks now. I’ve tried both IE and Chrome, and I get the same error message:

Your comment has been blocked because the blog owner has set their spam filter to not allow comments from users behind proxies.

If you are a regular commenter or you feel that your comment should not have been blocked, please contact the blog owner and ask them to modify this setting.

As far as I know I’m not behind a proxy, whatever that is. I use the same email addy and computer I’ve always used. If I’ve offended you somehow and you’ve blocked me, I would like the opportunity to apologize for the offense. If there’s a technical issue, I haven’t changed anything, but Win7 updates so many times, I wouldn’t know if it messed up my settings somehow.

As I told him, I have no idea why WordPress thinks that he’s behind a proxie, but I’m afraid that if I don’t block proxies I’ll be inundated with comment spam. I’m not sure how to allow his IP, because while I have a blacklist, I don’t think I have a white one. Any suggestions?

7 thoughts on “Commenting Problem”

  1. You might need to go back into the BIOS and see if you can switch it back over to legacy boot mode. Windows 8 machines use an UEFI boot interface which is supposed to be more secure. Not sure if Fedora supports UEFI or not. You might see it as an option to “disable secure boot mode”. On the Dells I work on you can hit f12 and there is a option to disable secure boot mode in the select boot option menu. I also see something there in the output that suggests that the Windows Boot Configuration Database partition is still there. It’s a little 300 meg partition that stores the Bootmgr database that holds the BCD info needed to load Windows. One Windows 7 it’s labeled BDEDrive.; not sure about Windows 8.

  2. I’ve no idea how that got posted under this article instead of your bleg post.

    But while I’m here only thing I can think of is that he might need to power cycle his router. Network Address Translation behind a router is a form of proxy.

  3. I had this exact message happen when using Chrome Beta under Android. It took me a long time to figure out.

    With Chrome, under “Settings/Advanced/BandwidthManagement” there is a setting for “Reduce Data Usage”. If set to true, Chrome will utilize proxy servers maintained at Google to compress data from any website before it is passed on to the computer/browser. I couldn’t post here from my Android tablet until that setting was set to false. What was frustrating, the setting gave no clue as to the fact it switched your device to use a proxy.

    I don’t know for sure if Chrome under Windows has a similar setting, but I suspect it might. For IE, perhaps they are just copying Chrome and have a similar feature. It would a an interesting way for the browsers to snoop on everything you would be looking at under the guise of “helping to make your browsing faster”.

    Anyway, I hope this information helps.

    1. Fails for me from work under Firefox and Opera on linux and usoft. Works fine from home on Firefox. At least in my case it’s the environment, not the browser.

      1. Probably someone needs to work out what criteria WordPress (that’s the blog software here, correct?) is using to determine a connection is coming from a proxy. I would assume it’s in the HTTP request headers, but perhaps there is a some other mechanism such as a Blackhole list of IP addresses suspected of being proxies.

        The following site may help determine things from the browser side:

        http://amibehindaproxy.com/

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