Difficulty accessing Quatloos

[MRN]

Is anyone else getting this message when they try to enter the site normally?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nmlmilmiobxxz ... 3.png?dl=0

I can get in by searching for a specific post in a specific thread, such as Neelu's, and then I can navigate the forum from there, but https://www.quatloos.com/ or any other top-level link brings up that error message.

iPad; DuckDuckGo browser; VPN/Blocker on.

If it's just me I can go back to using Safari to access the forums, no worries, but I'm curious.

[Pottapaug1938]

No; but the site has loaded slowly, or not at all, from time to time.

[webhick]

I resolved some issues that were causing the slowdown Friday/Saturday. And Wes mentioned it was running slow, and it did when I tried to load the website on my phone's data and on my work computer. But then it sped right back up.

That error message is from zbblock, which stops hackers. I tried through DDG and was unable to reproduce the error. I think there's a slightly different problem going on there anyway since the error itself is a string of code.

[MRN]

It's extremely weird as it really seems arbitrary which links throw that error up and which ones load.

I shall try tinkering with the Privacy Pro settings and see if that affects it at all.

[webhick]

It's also connecting through http and not https. Not sure why it's not redirecting to the secure site.

I restored an earlier version of our htaccess file since this problem happened after I added a couple of lines. I don't think it resolved the issue. But I'll keep looking after work tomorrow. I might scrap our htaccess and rebuild it from scratch.

[webhick]

Okay, I fixed the redirect issue and the trailing slash problem. I'm interested to see if that does anything on your end.

[webhick]

I noticed that the zbblock.php file in the virgin 0.7.0b download was a different size than the one we had on the server. Not sure how that could have happened but let's see if that fixes anything.

[webhick]

Found a legacy bot signature file and killed it. But now I need to head to bed. I'll check the kill logs in the morning to see if it fixes the error message issue.

[Burnaby49]

I had exactly the same problem a few years back when Web updated the software. Turned out that my old dinosaur of a computer using XP as the operating system couldn't update any browser to a high enough version to get past Quatloos security. At least that's how I interpreted Web's explanation at the time. I ended up buying a new computer and jumping from my year 2000 version of XP to Windows 10. However I much prefer XP to Windows 10 so I have two desktop computers. My XP dinosaur for anything that still works on it and this Windows 10 computer for whatever doesn't.

That said I've been having problems getting in for the past week or two but unrelated to your issues.

[JamesVincent]

I've been having issues with it loading slow on and off past week or so but didn't know if it was the site or just my computer. Haven't gotten any error codes in awhile on my desktop, get them every once in awhile on my phone. Firefox on both. I usually come in through the dot com address and then through a specific thread. Worked fine this time and went straight through.

[MRN]

That did it!

[Dark Optimist]

I have had trouble with slow loading, but no error messages.

As always, thanks to webhick for all the work!

[wserra]

As always, thanks to webhick for all the work!

Indeed.

[morrand]

Looks like it may be misbehaving again. From Firefox:

Code: Select all

The reason(s) your connection was interrupted are:
-> lmatch("/")Malformed UA (BOTB-30/FF).

If you can fix the issue yourself (such as using a different browser, connecting through a different Internet provider, etc) please do so. Otherwise, PLEASE ALLOW AT LEAST 24 HOURS so the site administrator has a chance to look into the problem.

The following connection details have been logged to help the site administrator resolve this issue:
Record #: 1301444
Time: Thu, 16 Feb 2023 22:06:21 UTC
Host / ISP: [...]
Geohost: [...]
IP Address: [...]
Post:
Query:
Stripped Query:
Referer:
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/110.0
Reconstructed URL: https:// www.quatloos.com /Q-Forum/

Generated by ZB-Block 0.7.0, based on code originally written by Zaphod

No problem connecting through Safari.

[webhick]

I have some time tonight to look into it.

[webhick]

Well, this is fun. I was checking the user agent for my Firefox installation and saw that I was on 109. So I upgraded to 110 (which is the same version as you).

And now I can't access the forum for the anti-hacker software without seeing the same error you're getting. I don't have a problem here because Skynet is still afraid of me.

I'm poking around in the software's signature files so I put a bypass in to allow the newest version of Firefox, but it's a little slow now that I've been banned from their site.

[mufc1959]

I'm having exactly the same problem, via Firefox, Chrome and Opera, through my ISP, which is Sky (in the UK). I'm logged in at work right now (which is forbidden, so I'm taking a chance, but just wanted to check if there was a problem via another ISP and browser), and I can log in on my phone if I disable WiFi, but that's not ideal.

However, I'm glad to see that it's not just me and that there is some issue with a script that's causing access issues. Hopefully the mods can sort it out soon enough.

[mufc1959]

On my home laptop now, I uninstalled Firefox 110 and reinstalled Firefox 109, and all is well, so it's definitely an issue with the latest update of Firefox. I've now disabled automatic updates for Firefox too, for the time being.

[morrand]

Well, this is fun. I was checking the user agent for my Firefox installation and saw that I was on 109. So I upgraded to 110 (which is the same version as you).

And now I can't access the forum for the anti-hacker software without seeing the same error you're getting. I don't have a problem here because Skynet is still afraid of me.

I'm poking around in the software's signature files so I put a bypass in to allow the newest version of Firefox, but it's a little slow now that I've been banned from their site.

It is a little more than that. Firefox 110 reports two different versions in its User-Agent, due apparently to some weirdness that causes it to be confused with IE11. So there’s an “rv:109” in there that evidently confuses the anti-hacker script. Forcing Firefox to report consistent version numbers lets me in.

Unfortunately it seems the script got tired of my experiments and locked me out, giving me a 503 error from home. So much for empiricism.

I’ve opened bug #1817530 with Firefox but, due to the aforementioned weirdness, it seems like it will be hard for them to fix. Meanwhile, if it’s possible to get the script to recognize “rv:109” as OK, at least until Firefox 120 comes around, that may be helpful.

[webhick]

I had tried a couple of things that apparently wasn't working. But, a patch was released for the anti-hacker software and I was able to get it by using my work VPN...since I'm still blocked on their site.

Hopefully that did the trick. I wiped out a ton of the bans so people who were formerly blocked should be able to get back in now. If anyone hears of someone else that is falsely blocked, let me know.