I am experiencing a strange situation where when I try to log into piefed.social, I get a notification that says “You have been banned.”. I initially took this at face value, and assumed I had somehow broken a rule, but upon trying to see why I was banned, I could not find any evidence that I had actually been banned, besides my login credentials producing that message.
The first anomaly was the inability to find any entry in the modlogs for my username (korendian or robert.meyer86@piefed.social). So there was no record of me being banned, but perhaps it was an incomplete log, so I continued my research. I looked for an e-mail that said I was banned, and I could not find one, but I did see e-mails from just recently, after I was banned, from piefed with notifications of activity on posts/comments. I am still getting these e-mails as if my account is still active. Lastly, my profile itself is still active, and still registering upvotes on comments and posts. I can successfully send messages from other users to my previous account, and overall it seems like an active and functional profile.
So am I crazy, or is something weird going on here? Where can I learn more about my possible ban, and why are all signs pointing to it being more of a glitch than an actual thing? I was not trolling or doing anything really out of line that I could see warranting a ban, but I also don’t know if there was some rule I broke somehow with how I was posting/commenting. Any insight into this situation would be a appreciated.
Here is my old profile for reference, let me know if it looks active to you:
I just checked in the admin panel and your user isn’t banned. It’s possible that you might be quite unlucky with a VPN exit node or something and are now on an IP that was previously subject to a ban. We tend to not use IP bans except in egregious cases, but those users also tend not to connect via their home connection.
Things you can try:
- Try clearing your browser cache for piefed.social. You want to remove any cookies that might be left in your browser from the site.
- If you are using a VPN try turning it off and clearing your browser cache. Basically trying to start fresh with a new IP address.
- If you aren’t using a VPN, try from a mobile device, third-party app, or one of our alternative frontends (photon, blorp)
It appears to indeed. A frontend bug with piefed.social. I was able to login without issue on p.piefed.social, but blorp seemed to also have issues, not saying I was banned, just never loading once I logged in.
Blorp dev here. Not sure how easy this would be to debug, but I’d love to try and fix it. Is anything at all loading (e.g. your user avatar, sidebars, etc) or is the everything stuck?
I appreciate that! The feed takes a bit to load, and when it does, it just says “Nothing to see here”. The profile, avatar and any other info related to the profile does not load, but it also does not let me attempt to login again and acts like it is logged in, even though it seems as if it is not.
I have tried on multiple devices and browsers. So it’s not an IP ban, since I cannot access it no matter what IP I am connecting from. I haven’t tried a different front end, but I will give it a go.
I’ve just done something very basic, but I just banned and unbanned your account - just a small attempt to kick the system.
Appreciate that! Unfortunately it did not change anything, p.piefed.social works fine, but piefed.social still says banned.
I’m really not sure what mechanisms are going on here. I see you made an alt on here. Did you use p.piefed.social before?
I have not used p.piefed.social prior to it being suggested here. Here are some screenshots to show the banned screen and the login screen, as well as another strange effect where I get a 404 error on using a username for login on p.piefed.social, but am able to login with e-mail address without an issue.
I get 403 Forbidden messages seemingly randomly when I use the web interface. Sometimes it works great. No problems. Most times, not. No issues using summit.
PieFed has some pretty intense ban-evasion countermeasures. I won’t go into details but yeah - good luck. It’s intentionally confusing because anyone trying to get around it probably deserves to have their time wasted.
Sorry if we have unintentionally caught you in this. Some false positives are likely.
Probably easier for you to just use another instance.
It seems to be a frontend issue, as I can login at p.piefed.social, but piefed.social and b.piefed.social both have issues. Good to know that this is the attitude towards user issues on piefed.
Yeah really, was looking into it, now I know to stay far away.
You’re not officially banned. Yet. ;p
