Originally Posted by
flg8rmatt
Is this site so special it needs such a heavy-handed approach to blocking VPN users? Lol. I mean, of course the owners of the site are free to do as they choose. Just like I am free to reduce my use of the site. It's just curious to me that of ALL the sites I visit, this is the only site that blocks me.
I concur. The Cloudflare thing really doesn’t make much sense to me. Cloudflare underpins a great % of the internet and it’s DDOS protections aren’t rare, but this is the only website other than Ticketmaster that gives issues with VPN, and even Ticketmaster with their much more apparent reason for needing to protect against bots buying up all the tickets is substantially more loosely guarded than FlyerTalk (switching servers a few times usually gets me to Ticketmaster).
My guess is that it was an extremely heavy handed decision made for this site and the consequences of which were never really weighed or revisited since. And like you, I use FT much less because of it, relying on the bit of info I get from email alerts instead of visiting the site itself. I had to log into the manually “blessed” VPN server just to write this, in response to your post that I found in my email.
oh well! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯