Terry - gracious1 has managed to lock herself out with the usual 403 Forbidden after the system disliked a profile edit she made.

Can you please restore her? Thanks!

Done -- I'll have to see what caused the false positive.

PMing you what she wrote in there (she emailed me).

Thanks for your assistance! Very glad to be back. Now that I understand what happened, I am sure it won't happen again!

Glad you got in, and at least you weren't trying on Internet Explorer as well as that's keeping me out at the moment when I try and use it as I reported a moment ago. Our admins are always on the case once alerted.

Now that I have experienced this, may I make a suggestion? Luckily, I had the email address of an administrator who is also my Team Leader, and so I was able to have access restored, but there may be others in the future who are not so fortunate.

What about establishing an email address strictly for reporting when a person is locked out due to inadvertent content that triggers the anti-hacking defenses? It could strictly be for this purpose.

Or possibly somewhere you can go in as a guest from the first screen to click that says "I'm locked out", then it says "enter name here" and you type your name in, that's it, and it is whisked away to Terry's top priorities, then a message that says "administrators have been notified. Please be patient while we remedy the situation".

Or the email. Whichever. :P

That actually doesn't work when you have a "403 Forbidden" error because what has happened is your IP address has been blocked from accessing the site. Nothing in the domain "funtrivia.com" was accessible.

When this happened, because of some medication I was taking I was not able to leave my home and go to an Internet cafe or a library and log in to the site and ask for help. So I was stuck. Bad timing.

There may be others who are shut-ins or invalids, live in a rural area, have limited mobility or permanent disabilities, lack a car, own only a desktop computer & no laptop or smartphone, etc. -- who also can't leave their homes to get another IP address.

That is why I suggest an email address for when your IP is blocked from accessing "funtrivia.com".

I think it is especially important to provide this service for people who have paid money for a Gold Membership!! There must be some emergency contact available, after all. It's only sensible.

My bad, I thought it was when you logged in that it happened.

So, I guess, scrap my idea.

You might be able to access the Contact Us page as a guest via a proxy server, I had luck with that once.

Also my understanding is that it's a temporary block (24 hours?). It's not quite an "emergency" that everyone really really needs a contact for.

Most regular players also have some way to contact a teammate who will then relay the request - in fact most unblock requests reach us through players' teammates.

What happens to those players who don't have a team? Are they just denied access for evermore?

The lockout is a security measure. It lasts 24 hours.

It happened to me last year, twice. The first time I was able to login from work. The second time I watched tv and, gulp, read a book; I think I was also told to go outside and mow the lawns.

It actually went beyond 24 hours for me. I had to get an administrator to intervene for me and request Terry to manually allow me access again. That is why I am suggesting an email address to be provided in case such a thing should happen again to someone who does NOT happen to know an administrator well enough to have his/her email address.

I am really not understanding why I am getting resistance for an idea that I think is simply a basic service to provide -- a means to contact in case of being denied access to the site for more than 24 hours. It makes sense simply to create a mechanism for dealing with this problem.

As I say, there are people who cannot get Internet access outside their home, either temporarily or permanently.

you didn't though, George? Did you??

Lockouts exceeding the normal period are very rarely false positives. In fact, the only such case I remember was yours.

I've managed many large websites and indeed player forums and I will tell you, free, gratis, and for nothing that while the people requesting services like that may think they are being perfectly reasonable, they are not the ones who have to deal with the people who subsequently abuse the system. There are idiots everywhere, even on FT. Hard to believe, I know, but true.

Being locked out doesn't happen to many people and it doesn't happen often - what is the point of instituting a system that will require active monitoring if it's going to work while adding yet another avenue for idiots of all ages when all that is required is for the person affected to wait 24 hours and if that doesn't solve the problem, contact a friend who can post a message here?

Point taken Flopsy, except for your last sentence. Graci's question is still being ignored: what if you don't know anyone to contact?

Then presumably you read a book and mow the lawn and talk to your family.
And wait 24 hours.

Come mow my lawn. Though you might have to clear the snow off it first.

Not snowing here, my lawn is mown by guineapig. Takes a while, but they are very thorough.

You could always spend that extra time....

Writing a quiz in a Word Document to easily transfer to FunTrivia once you are back in.

And so I have entered the name for an author challenge: A Day in the Life of a Lockout

I understand the request gracious. The problem is, the last thing you want to give a suspected spammer (and 98% of those locked out really ARE spammers or attempting hackers) is an email address to spam.

Gold members have an email address from paypal that they can mail. I usually read them at least once a day.

My goal is to remove all false positives so that real people just don't get locked out. That has improved a lot -- very few people accidentally get locked out nowadays, although I am always improving it.

Here's another way to handle it. I'll gladly exchange email addresses with gracious1 if she PM's me. This method is only effective for members who check their email daily and who remain active FT accounts. That leaves some possiblity of still being locked out. Terry's okay to use his Paypal address is probably the best solution for GMs or lapsed GMs.

Yes, you see, that is the question. What to do for those people who:
(1) have nobody to contact, and
(2) cannot get another IP address (whether for disability, rural isolation, etc.)

I'll bet there are more people like this than one may realize. I just don't want to see anyone fall through the cracks. (Especially when I nearly did!)

Unfortunately, there's no easy solution to this. If you're blocked out of the site you aren't going to be able to access anything here to link you to the proper people.

You'll have to organize something, perhaps through your team or some friendly players you trust. Or, perhaps you can contact a friend or family member in Real Life with an account and they can post a message on your behalf.

And as I said on the previous page you can always try accessing via a proxy server. It worked for me once. I wasn't able to log into my account, but I could send a message through Contact Us and just said who I was and included my e-mail, and Sue was able to contact me with that and pass the problem on.

Another time I was able to log in through a proxy server and post in the chatboards (not here in the Forums). It kept kicking me out and I wasn't sure the post even posted, but it did.

Guitatgoddess, could you describe Proxy Server to us and how to establish one?

Edit: Sorry I forgot to be polite. Please?