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Quick question: 403 Forbidden

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 12:53 am
by LuCiFeR[SD]
Is anybody else finding this is happening more frequently? I know it is down to the load balancing/anti-spam measures in place. But I am finding it is actually disrupting my enjoyment of visiting the Purebasic site now. I am one of these forum users who will take a quick glance within a category to see if there are any posts that interest me and if they don't I'm off looking elsewhere. but the trouble is, I trigger the 403 forbidden pretty much every other click.

Now I don't want this to turn into a flame war, but I would be interested to see how badly this is affecting people visiting the forum, or if it is just the way I browse that is triggering the issues for me :)

so lets try and keep the thread constructive lol :P

Re: Quick question: 403 Forbidden

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 1:05 am
by luis
Never happens to me, and I'm here a lot.

Are you using some proxy, caching proxy, or your provider does that ?

Re: Quick question: 403 Forbidden

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 1:07 am
by idle
doesn't happen here and I'm at the arse end of the internet

Re: Quick question: 403 Forbidden

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 1:26 am
by MachineCode
idle wrote:doesn't happen here and I'm at the arse end of the internet
Doubt it... I'm paying $29/month for mobile "broadband" and only getting dial-up speeds with it. :(

Re: Quick question: 403 Forbidden

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 1:46 am
by c4s
luis wrote:Never happens to me, and I'm here a lot.
Same here. I visit purebasic.fr pretty frequently and I've never seen that message before.

Re: Quick question: 403 Forbidden

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 1:48 am
by moogle
Never had it happen to me. What url are you visiting?

Re: Quick question: 403 Forbidden

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 2:03 am
by LuCiFeR[SD]
luis wrote:Never happens to me, and I'm here a lot.

Are you using some proxy, caching proxy, or your provider does that ?
I use virgin Media broadband (50Mb), and they don't use a proxy (although, you can use a caching proxy if you need one). perhaps I should be asking if anybody else is here who is UK based using Virgin Media having any problems with this site?

The url is just "http://www.purebasic.fr/english/" but the error can happen just randomly. Just try browsing quickly between pages and you may notice. But you see, I tend to just scan topic titles and if I don't see anything I am interested in I am off. I suspect all it is, is I am just clicking between pages to fast lol... but, I just wanted to be sure.

I've just tried switching browsers... I generally use chrome, but it doesn't seem to affect firefox. interesting. I wonder if Chrome has changed the way it Id's itself?

Re: Quick question: 403 Forbidden

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 2:17 am
by moogle
In the UK here too but on another ISP. I've opened quite alot of pages in one go and not got it.
It's gonna be hard to find another UK user and then one that is on VM :)

I'm also using firefox so it could be chrome.

Re: Quick question: 403 Forbidden

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 2:27 am
by LuCiFeR[SD]
oh I dunno... VM is one of the most widely used ISP's in the UK. I would say there is a reasonable chance somebody else on here uses it lol :P But yeah, it could be chrome that is doing something that this server configuration doesn't like. But the only person who can really answer that is Fred :P I guess he would know if the anti-spam measures he has implemented are colliding with my IP, browser User Agent string or whatever.

I know I am not the only person who has been affected by this problem though as a quick forum search revealed. But it would be interesting to know if the other affected user (milan1612) was using chrome :P

Re: Quick question: 403 Forbidden

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 2:29 pm
by Nituvious
It happens to me when I search too much in too little of time. The first time it happened I thought I was banned or something, haha.

I am using Google Chrome as well.

Re: Quick question: 403 Forbidden

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 2:45 pm
by moogle
Yeah VM is widely used in the UK. Alot of people have it with their TV subscription. It's just that I don't see many users from the UK here :D

If Nituvious gets it with Chrome then it could just be the browser. I'm guessing it could be preloading webpages (the stuff that makes it so fast) and when you do something else the server sees it as an attack or something? :)

Re: Quick question: 403 Forbidden

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 3:24 pm
by DarkDragon
LuCiFeR[SD] wrote:Is anybody else finding this is happening more frequently? I know it is down to the load balancing/anti-spam measures in place. But I am finding it is actually disrupting my enjoyment of visiting the Purebasic site now. I am one of these forum users who will take a quick glance within a category to see if there are any posts that interest me and if they don't I'm off looking elsewhere. but the trouble is, I trigger the 403 forbidden pretty much every other click.
I have disabled my ad blockers etc. as they send a second request. Since then I'm not receiving the 403 error anymore. I replaced the ad blockers by this host file: http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

Re: Quick question: 403 Forbidden

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 3:53 pm
by LuCiFeR[SD]
DarkDragon wrote:I have disabled my ad blockers etc. as they send a second request. Since then I'm not receiving the 403 error anymore. I replaced the ad blockers by this host file: http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
I'm not using an adblocker with chrome. Only extensions I use are web developer, firebug lite, php documentation, but unless they are explicitly activated, they do nothing. I had already considered web accelerators etc, but it isn't down to that. I'm still pretty convinced that it is down to the user agent ident string myself, I could be wrong though and I often am lol. or perhaps chrome itself is doing something differently over the last few months to what it has in the past.

I suppose I could try a small experiment with spoofing firefoxes user agent ident in chrome and see if that does the trick.

Re: Quick question: 403 Forbidden

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 9:11 pm
by idle
you could also try removing the boards cookies at the bottom of the index page.
I'm using chromium here but have not had any problems.

Re: Quick question: 403 Forbidden

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 10:42 pm
by LuCiFeR[SD]
idle wrote:you could also try removing the boards cookies at the bottom of the index page.
I'm using chromium here but have not had any problems.
I have actually tried that, but it made no difference. It's not like I don't have a solution to fix my problem, I can just switch to firefox. but it seems to be something strange that chrome is doing. Even if I change user agent it makes no difference with it, but firefox works perfectly no matter how fast I browse the board. it is interesting from a technical point of view, and something I may investigate a little deeper at some point. I could switch to chromium I suppose, but then it is a few steps behind with security updates and stuff, that's the only down side of forked products. I would still be interested to know what fred's server logs show with my connection. this kind of thing always intrigues me, although it is looking like it affects me more than anybody else, which is strange in itself really. But I will try an absolutely clean installation of chrome next, just to see if it makes a difference.