Celestia Forums

New results provide best evidence yet for elusive Higgs boson.

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http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewtopic.php?t=419

Fridger

Fridger, Excellent article on Celestia Matters as always. Many thanks.
David

DOJOMO wrote:Fridger, Excellent article on Celestia Matters as always. Many thanks.
David

David,

you are very welcome.
Fridger

Fridger,

Just wondering why you have posted a link to the celestialmatters forum in my thread here, yet when I try to visit that link I find I am banned from browsing your forum.

This seems a little strange, as your reply to my thread suggests you are trying to attract visitors to your board.
David appears to have had no problem. It appears that my IP is blocked.
Please would you investigate.

Thanks

)??(??(J?E)??)??( wrote:Fridger,

Just wondering why you have posted a link to the celestialmatters forum in my thread here,...

Being a professional (astro-)particle physicist, I have personally attended the Higgs talks by ALEPH and CMS at CERN on Dec. 13. Right thereafter already, I wrote at Celestial Matters (CM) a report with detailed links to the original CERN sources (ALEPH and CMS). My CM thread was not only one day earlier, but also contained more reliable sources than your link to BBC. Since the present Higgs evidence is still marginal, a careful formulation with deep insight into this complex matter is essential! I am not the only one, who often mistrusts so-called science writers... . Hence my link.

It obviously would not have made sense to start a new thread at shatters.net, merely to link to an earlier, more detailed and more reliable report...

Many shatters.net users are also registered at CM and indeed have read my Higgs thread via this link. You are the only one who seems to have encountered a problem. Certainly, I have never consciously blocked anything related to your account / ID. As a check, I have just now logged off both at shatters.net and at CM and nevertheless had no problems to read my CM article by clicking on the shatters.net link as an unregistered guest user. Certainly, as a shatters.net user (ID t00fri) I have no problems either.

If you manage to read my thread via shatters.net as a logged-out guest, but not as a logged-in shatters.net user, one possible reason that comes to my mind could be your "unusual" user name. Possibly, its syntax collides with some implicit settings or forgotten explicit settings in our box software.

This seems a little strange, as your reply to my thread suggests you are trying to attract visitors to your board.

First of all, see the reasons given above.
Moreover, our CM site is not just another web site. As a reminder, I am a longstanding co-author and developer of Celestia (10 years!) and indeed there is a friendly collaboration with shatters.net. This is e.g. reflected by the fact that the sticky shatters.net thread CelestialMatters News, viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10578, counts about 35000 reads meanwhile!

Just have a look how many readers my CM threads tend to have within a short while, and it should be clear that I have no reason for "fishing" users from shatters.net via that link in YOUR thread

David appears to have had no problem. It appears that my IP is blocked.
Please would you investigate.

If you'd explicitly login into CM, I could directly analyse what is going on. It is always possible that there is an accidental blocking, because I had to delete and block by hand thousands of chinese spammers during the past year.

Fridger

t00fri wrote:If you manage to read my thread via shatters.net as a logged-out guest, but not as a logged-in shatters.net user, one possible reason that comes to my mind could be your "unusual" user name. Possibly, its syntax collides with some implicit settings or forgotten explicit settings in our box software.

If you'd explicitly login into CM, I could directly analyse what is going on. It is always possible that there is an accidental blocking, because I had to delete and block by hand thousands of chinese spammers during the past year.

Fridger

Hi Fridger,

I'm not too worried about it. I only occasionally browse your forum, and I have no desire to become a member, although I would be interested in reading your article about the Higgs Boson.
Perhaps you wouldn't mind, for my benefit, cutting and pasting that text into this thread in the meantime until your server issues are resolved.

Perhaps your efforts to block spammers has caused your server to be blocking a whole country or region, so for your benefit I have just tried to visit that page again (in the last 15-20 minutes), and I will do so again immediately after posting this message, so you should have no trouble to identify my IP address in your server logs from the timestamp of THIS post. (A bit of timezone conversion may be required depending on the whereabouts of the respective servers).

FYI, I was not logged on to shatters so nothing to do with username.
Hope this is helpful.

)??(??(J?E)??)??( wrote:Hi Fridger,
...
Perhaps your efforts to block spammers has caused your server to be blocking a whole country or region, so for your benefit I have just tried to visit that page again (in the last 15-20 minutes), and I will do so again immediately after posting this message, so you should have no trouble to identify my IP address in your server logs from the timestamp of THIS post. (A bit of timezone conversion may be required depending on the whereabouts of the respective servers).

FYI, I was not logged on to shatters so nothing to do with username.
Hope this is helpful.

Unfortunately, the time stamp is by far not enough for identification of your IT address. Within a window of a few minutes around your time stamp HERE, I saw 8 guest IDs from a number of countries at CM, including the US. Login attempts from China are blocked by default. I am sorry for this measure, but this was the only way of keeping some control over the spammer invasion. I have installed no other general blockings. But note: the blocking ONLY refers to login attempts NOT to browsing!

So unfortunately, I don't have enough info about you to investigate your problem further. Since so far no-one else reported a similar problem in browsing CM, it's a bit early to speak of "my server issues". Note also that CelestialMatters is hosted on a large academic server (ibiblio.org) in the US, and thus there may be constraints that I cannot modify.

I have asked all CM users to report a similar problem in my CelestialMatters News thread.

Previously, you were visiting CM occasionly, as you wrote. In these cases you also did not encounter a problem reading any posts? Hence your present problem only refers to reading my Higgs thread?? This really sounds strange. I just made sure again: ALL CM guests have permission to view and read the contents of the forum entitled The Celestial Matters Lounge that contains my thread on the Higgs boson searches.

Are you able to read OTHER threads in this forum???

Fridger

t00fri wrote:At CM, blocking only refers to login attempts, not to browsing!

I was anonymously browsing only. Browsing is definitely being blocked.

t00fri wrote:You were visiting CM occasionly, as you wrote. In these cases you also did not encounter a problem reading posts?

That was some time ago, and no problems as far as I recall.

t00fri wrote:Hence your present problem only refers to reading my Higgs thread?? This really sounds strange. I just made sure again: All guests have permission to view and read the contents of the forum entitled The Celestial Matters Lounge that contains my thread on the Higgs boson searches.
Are you able to read OTHER threads therein???

Cannot even read the homepage. (http://forum.celestialmatters.org/).
FWIW, my browser is Firefox.

)??(??(J?E)??)??( wrote:Cannot even read the homepage. (http://forum.celestialmatters.org/).
FWIW, my browser is Firefox.

This REALLY doesn't look like a CM problem now. Please note that I have up to 1000 CM forum visitors per day, and thus I would certainly have received some complaints if viewing the CM forum home page was a more general CM server problem!

You are sure aware that somtimes the viewing of web pages is blocked automatically by security applications being either part of the used browser or separate (virus protection software). Some not so perfect virus protectors don't even report such blockings beforehand...

Are you able to read the CelestialMatters WEB site?
http://www.celestialmatters.org/

Fridger

I am also having problems accessing the CM site with a "You have been banned from this forum." message on all pages that I try to access.

bdm wrote:I am also having problems accessing the CM site with a "You have been banned from this forum." message on all pages that I try to access.

Hi bdm,

I am very sorry for this. So something must have gone wrong during my heroic efforts of getting rid of many thousands of chinese spammers....I checked your CM account: your last visit was quite long ago: in Sep 2008. Anyway, I made sure that your CM account (email, username) is definitely NOT banned in my CM records.

While the country of your internet server is NOT identical to that of )??(??(J?E)??)??(, it's not too far away either... Since in the past, I was forced to ban whole ranges of IP addresses because of the overboarding spammer invasion, I cannot exclude that your number/network has been accidentally banned.

Unfortunately, I can only research further, if I know the significant digits of your IT network.

Fridger

Same problem here (NZ)

You may find the following tools useful in resolving this issue...
http://www.countryipblocks.net/country-blocks/ip-range-format/
http://www.morningstarsecurity.com/research/geoipgen

Chuft-Captain wrote:Same problem here (NZ)

You may find the following tools useful in resolving this issue...
http://www.countryipblocks.net/country-blocks/ip-range-format/
http://www.morningstarsecurity.com/research/geoipgen

Many thanks, guys, for your active help!

Indeed, notably the IP numbers of NZ and AU are quite a bit "interleaved" and my impatience with these thousands of chinese spammers led me to banning ranges that were NOT chinese, but rather from NZ and AU!

Please, CC, )??(??(J?E)??)??( and bdm, could you report about success/failure when logging into CM now.

Fridger