A few of my VPN's IPs seem to be blocked. I just get greeted with an empty page (I checked inspect element). Is there any way to submit an unban request to these IPs? It's really annoying.
This is in the FAQ: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html</a>. If the unban link described there doesn't work for you, please email us and we'll take care of it.<p>I'm sorry that this is necessary, btw. We hate it when legit users get blocked, but HN is also hit by a ton of crawlers and it's hard to distinguish the two. Since our app server runs on a single core, we don't have a drop of spare performance.<p>Some big improvements which we've been working on for months will hopefully roll out soonish, which should allow us to loosen things up quite a bit.
I use HN via Tor. Occasionally I get a 'prove you are legit' message, which is fine. The biggest problem is that my account seems to be permanently flagged for restricted posting; after even a few comments I get a message: 'you are posting too fast', and HN won't accept more comments for awhile.<p>@mods: Perhaps after an account gains a certain amount of karma, even 500, that flag could be disabled even for Tor users.
Same thing happens to me. I've noticed that it works fine if I'm not logged in, but if I am logged in or I try the login page, I get a blank page if my VPN is on.<p>The Chrome network panel shows a 403 code (Forbidden).<p>Edit: I can write this up in an email to hn@ycombinator.com if requested.
Requests like these are better sent to hn@ycombinator.com, but note that they simply won't reply to you if they get busy or don't feel like it.<p>From my testing, HN has various anti-abuse features to prevent people from creating accounts to dodge bans or moderation penalties. E.g. if you create an account using Opera's VPN, your account's comments will all show up as [dead].<p>Perhaps they believe that there's no valid reason to use a VPN to check HN other than to dodge penalties. Either way, it's important to remember that we don't see the <i>good</i> things that come of choices like this.<p>(Or that it's just a random bug.)