I had been using NordVPN for several months and found today that it no longer works with FT.

Have you messaged IBJoel with the IP address? Tmk, their "pound sand" asks us to contact the site administrator, and Joel is the holder of that hot potato.

If I point NordVPN to San Francisco, FT doesn’t work. If I point it to Los Angeles, it does work.

If I point NordVPN to New York, FT doesn’t work. If I point it to Chicago, it does work.

That just means that the IP you share with many other NordVPN users in Chicago and Los Angeles hasn't yet been put on the Cloudflare poor-reputation list that Internet Brands use as part of their general defenses against bad stuff.

Worth remembering that when you use a public VPN service the IP you break out onto the internet with is shared with many other users, some of whom are up to no good. The public VPN operators are good at pushing the perceived benefits of their services, and whilst evading geo-location based content restrictions and/or pricing, and some local/country based access restrictions are reasonable use cases; overall because of who you are sharing the service with its my strong suggestion that public VPNs do not improve your security posture to the services you're interacting with.

I don’t need to use a VPN to access FT, but often forget to turn it off if I’m streaming shows. I find that my VPN sites for streaming work fine for FT, other US cities are hit and miss. I use VPN Unlimited.

I live near ORD and it doesn't work. So it doesn't work in Chicago now. I'm visiting my son in STL and it doesn't work there either.

Will do. Note for the mods, for some reason I wasn't able to copy and paste this in with my previous response via edit. So please merge, if convenient for you.

I'm a long timer on FT and have zero reception nowadays using my mozilla VPN on any browser. Turn it off, and no problem. this is using a NY connection.
hate to have this happen on next China trip!

I have about ten a$$ servers that work fine with ft favorited. I won't post them here, but am happy to pm if interested

I am not on a VPN but Cloudfare keeps blocking my work network. I click human verification but no captcha or similar test even comes up. Very annoying. It wasn't this way on Monday 06th February.

This should have been turned off today

Great - thanks a lot. Normal connectivity being experienced by me at work now !

Cloudflare is still blocking some of my favorite Astrill servers (I steer clear of the super popular ones). I always try to submit IP addresses.

I use Mozilla's VPN when out and my hotspot won't work (or at a lounge where their WiFi is faster). Mozilla's backend is on cloudflare, so that makes it doubly confusing. Here's the last error I got.

I find that I am now able to access FT when my NordVPN VPN is active.

Did you test with a lot of servers?

Not yet. I will try to disconnect and reconnect a few times over the next few days. For performance I usually stay within the cluster of NordVPN servers for the geographical area where I am currently located.

If you have a NordVPN server I should try, let me know.

Update:

I've been meaning to post this information for a while but keep forgetting. I have been using NordVPN when connecting to several (well over 10) websites that use CloudFlare as a security front end. Never had any issue with any of them. Makes me wonder what the requirements were for accessing FlyerTalk.

If you don't mind my prying, would you be able to PM me some/all of them? I'd be very interested to know what they were so we could possibly improve our experience here

Sure thing. I can think of two or three right now and will send the URLs to you via PM later on today.

I don't use Nord often these days because it isn't doesn't work very well in China. As long as you have servers you're happy with on your travel circuit, I suppose it doesn't really matter if others get blocked by Cloudflare and/or FT. On the other hand, it's difficult to declare "VPN x" is solid on FT without getting a bunch of data points.

FWIW, I'm using a NORD VPN server at the moment - one in the UK that has not usually been able to access this site.

I'll be in STL for a long weekend starting tomorrow evening. I'll report back as to how FT works with a different set pf VPN servers (NordVPN).

Update:

I tried adter arriving at my son's place and got the following error:I got an error when visiting www.flyertalk.com/forum/usercp.php.

Error code: 1020

Ray ID: 79aa68117ae0495d

Country: US

Data center: stl01

IP: 148.72.164.189

Timestamp: 2023-02-17 00:29:03 UTC

How did you manage that?

Same here, if I am watching something, then go on FT I get "access denied" message. Frustrating.

I did nothing different. I assume all the changes were on the FT/IB side of things.

I'll be back in Chicago Monday afternoon and will report back to make sure it still works there.

Update:

When I returned home on the afternoon of Monday 20 February, I found that connecting to FT while using NordVPN in the Chicago area no longer works.

I find this very interesting. It seems like I was able to connect to FT for a couple of weeks (starting on/near 8 February). The last successful connection was on Thursday 16 February. When I arrived in the St Louis area on the afternoon of Thursday 16 February, I could not connect to FT using NordVPN. On my return to the Chicago area last Monday (20 February) it did not work.

Update #2:

I had not tried accessing FT with my VPN active for 3 or 4 days and this morning it now works.

I don’t know whether this is VPN-related, but my Treat Protection-enabled NordVPN which blocks trackers and ads appears to suppress browser notifications for quotes and likes. Once I quit NordVPN and go to FT, days of notifications pop up.

For the ones using Nord VPN, using a Canadian access point works fine. US and most western European countries don’t.

I have found that many (most?) of the Chicago area NordVPM gateways seems to work. But when I am visiting family in St Louis, non of them work.

​​​​​​A$$ is similar (i.e. some servers work and some don't). I don't understand why it's not possible for IB to whitelist our favorite servers' IP addresses (i.e. just create a form or offload the task to Cloudflare).

I have been using NordVPN for some time. I use a lot (and I mean A LOT) of websites that have Cloudflare on their front end and I have used these sites from the time I started using NordVPN. I have never had any issue with all these other sites, Only with IB/FlyerTalk.

This is just my personal opinion but I assume that there is something needed on the IB/FT side that will allow traffic to flow quite freely between NordVPN users and FlyerTalk. And I also assume it is some sort of configuration option that do not require whitelisting servers and/or IP address ranges.

IBJoel - I'm also getting blocked. I'm using Proton VPN. The error message I receive is below:

I got an error when visiting [flyertalk].

Error code: 1020
Ray ID: 7d8ee148b830876c
Country: US
Data center: ord07
IP: 89.187.180.49
Timestamp: 2023-06-17 22:55:25 UTC

Accessing FT does not require a VPN yet, but Google (including gmail), YT, yahoo, and FB do. I plug A because it works for me, but I know there are cheaper solutions on offer.

I don't understand your reply. I am using a VPN and am getting blocked by Flyertalk. None of the sites you mentioned require the use of a VPN to my knowledge, and none of them block you when using one.

At this point in time, you can access FT in China sans VPN.

Where did it say he was in China?

I use Express VPN and have been unable to access FT using Los Angeles, San Francisco or Seattle connections. I have to turn my VPN off to access this site.

I can’t generally access FT using Surfshark and couldn’t access previously with NordVPN - same error as others have posted. This is clearly a configuration issue as other websites with active Cloudflare monitoring work. I use various connection points in Canada, the US and Asia.

It’s ironic that a travel-focused website can’t be accessed while using basic travel online safeguards.

HA! I got booted from FT when posting this message as my VPN pause expired.

same, from Western Europe . Pretty annoying, to be honest. I need VPN for a few other sites, and am now forced to constantly switch VPN on and off. Not aware of any other site that malfunctions when VPN is on (I don’t use it to circumvent streaming restrictions, so not sure about that), and I don’t really see why FT would care if I am on a VPN (but perhaps that is covered earlier in this thread).

I don't think FT will ever address this. I've gotten use to turning it on and off. This is the only one that I use which seems to block VPNs en mass.

Same here. It is quite annoying that most every other site is fine, but this one, no go. I use different locations, Canada and US, and no luck. Hopefully this gets addressed soon.

Today I was blocked on the Astrill Santa Clara server for the first time ever (I use it all the time)
https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...c2b3e58377.jpg
https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...a678da8e8f.jpg