AAO Moderator, Resident Trial Reviewer
Gender: None specified
Rank: Suspect
Joined: Sat Aug 01, 2015 4:34 pm
Posts: 5
This is Enthalpy, the Community Manager for Ace Attorney Online. I've received a PM on here asking "Why am I [the asker] IP banned for 'Account created solely for advertizing'?" Due to the forum settings for Court Records, I can't send PMs right now, and given that this affects more than the asker, I figured it would be best to make a topic about the situation.
The tl:dr; version is that
If you are reading this, you are IP banned by mistake. It's not just you. I've alerted Unas, who hosts the forum, about the issue. There's nothing more I can do until he fixes things.The longer version is this:
We've had several accounts created in the last few days that find an old topic and post there with one paragraph about nothing in particular, followed by a link to some site selling something. By the fourth such account, I decided that it was worth checking whether an IP ban would help. The accounts seemed to have been created from the same IP, so I performed what should have been a routine ban.
For reasons I don't understand, immediately after, my IP was banned, and every AAO user I spoke to reported they were banned too. At this point, the only way to repair things requires more permissions than I have, so I've notified Unas. I haven't heard back from him just yet, but I'll report any news here. I don't have a good estimate of how long Unas will need to repair things, but I expect to at least hear back from him within the next day or two. I should have more information then.
As for
why this happened, I can only speculate, but this is the first IP ban moderation has performed since the recent forum upgrade. Other things broke in the forum upgrade, so I can only imagine that IP bans were also one of them.
Feel free to ask here if you have any questions.