you say: not solely to fatten NameBio’s coffers. Of course, I know this is not the only reason. But this is one of the reasons
and you are making a verbal attack, You are such a mercenary businessman.
Because you incorrectly judged that the network I was using was a VPN, a problem I had already informed you about. I had previously purchased a 2-year membership from you, so I will not pay you again
That was a joke message written by AI to make fun of how you kept insisting that I should swear to God that getting more subscriptions was not the reason for blocking VPNs. Like the Bible, it wasn't meant to be taken literally. For you to try to extract any serious meaning or admissions from that sarcastic message is crazy.
As I said many times now, we are not blocking VPNs, we are blocking HOSTING COMPANIES. Yes, many VPNs use those hosting companies, and thus get blocked as well.
Some regular ISPs also use these hosting companies for infrastructure, and sometimes it blocks those too, but this is very rare. When that happens, usually they have carved out a clear block if IPs that are under their own name, and we can whitelist those blocks. Yours was not like that.
Nobody EVER said you were using a VPN, not a single time. What I said to you was literally this:
"That IP address is owned by Tencent Cloud Computing, which is a hosting company that we blocked due to abuse. I can't whitelist a server IP unfortunately."
Even the message on the ban page does not say you ARE using a VPN, it says IF. Here is the exact message:
"Your IP address is owned by a hosting company or data center that we block. If you are using a VPN please turn it off and try again in a few minutes. Some browsers such as Opera and Puffin, and some antivirus programs, act as a proxy and it is the same as using a VPN. This is a permanent ban subject to review."
And then also says this in a notification:
"Note: Paying members are allowed to access the site through a VPN."
Show me where ANYONE said you were using a VPN. Go ahead... I'll wait. Your IP address is owned by one of the largest cloud hosting companies in China and I'm not going to whitelist it. If your IP shows as Tencent because of a VPN, you can turn it off.
If it's because of your ISP, that sucks for you. You can complain to them and ask them to work with Tencent to register a "sub-assignment" or "customer assignment" to their blocks of IP addresses within Tencent's allocation, to properly identify the ISP as controlling those IP blocks. Then I could whitelist that ISP, even though it is within a large allocation of IP addresses that we otherwise block due to abuse. Otherwise my hands are tied.
So to recap:
1. We do not directly and intentionally block VPNs. We block hosting companies, which indirectly blocks a lot of (but not all) VPNs. Which I'm ok with, because if free users are also anonymous it is harder to enforce our ToS.
2. We do this 100% as an anti-bot measure, not to force or encourage paid subscriptions. Paid subscriptions are simply a way around it, because it would be inappropriate to block someone who is paying for a service based only on their IP neighborhood. If you insist on believing otherwise, even in the face of my candid responses, then nothing is going to change your mind and I don't really care to be honest.
3. Nobody said you were using a VPN. I said your IP is owned by a hosting company that we block, and due to how the IP is registered with the RIR, I'm not able to unblock it, since I can't distinguish it from the rest of Tencent's cloud infrastructure for hosting servers.
That is all. Take from that what you will, that seems to be your habit anyway.
