Understanding IP Address Bans While Traveling Abroad

[EnumaElish]

While I was traveling abroad I was not able to log in; an error message said my IP address was banned. Can anyone explain why that might have happened?

 

[Moonbear]

How were you accessing PF? It has come up before that IP addresses from open proxy servers are blocked from accessing PF, so it could be that during your travels, you were using something that was an open proxy or that someone had reported as being one. That, or maybe you've stumbled upon some internet cafe where some past nuisance posted from and had their IP blocked. Did you have the problem in multiple locations, or just one place?

 

[cronxeh]

I once tried to access the forums through a public proxy server.. Matter of fact most of them seem banned - perhaps the ban is for originating port rather than one domain. In either case you were probably on a LAN in some internet cafe that used outbound ports 8080 or 3128 or just 80?

 

[EnumaElish]

Thanks for the inputs.

The U.S. equivalent of my connectedness is having a single 900 number that anyone can dial in from anywhere and be connected to the Internet over a nation-wide Verizon, or Bell South, or SBC. I was never in an Internet cafe because I had my laptop with me and could dial that nation-wide ISP number.

A mentionable aspect is that the IP address was being blocked in a certain location but not in another location, although in both instances the IP was being assigned by the same nation-wide ISP.