Sometimes that message shows when you're temporarily rate limited, if you see it for more than a few minutes then it isn't temporary. In that case if you weren't doing something abusive do what it says on the page and contact us, I'm happy to manually review it and reverse it. Also just as a side note, the /relax page doesn't check if you're still banned or not, so don't just refresh that page. Always try to go back to the home page to see if it is still in effect.
@Josytal is spot on. The amount of abuse we receive is mind-boggling. Before we implemented our current security systems we'd have single IP addresses hitting us hundreds of thousands of times per day. There are a lot of ways to get banned now, and it has been like that for a few years. Without getting into everything, here are some examples:
- If you go over a certain number of searches in a day, you get banned.
- If you use a VPN, you get banned.
- If you use TOR or any other kind of proxy, you get banned.
- If you try to access the site from a hosting company, you get banned.
- If you start hitting a ton of details pages and you're not a search engine, you get banned.
- If you search sequentially like aa, ab, ac, ad, etc., you get banned.
- Even if you shuffle the above strategy randomly (za, qb, ed, etc.), you get banned.
- If you try to walk through all the results with small price bands, you get banned.
- If you try to walk through all the results with small length bands, you get banned.
There are others but you probably get the idea. In addition to all of that, we also check your IP address against a security service that uses machine learning to give you a risk score. If you are scored maximum risk, you get banned.
Considering that we serve more than a quarter of a million unique users a year that are doing multiple millions of searches from almost every country on the planet, the system has a very small number of false positives. And again I'm happy to review those manually and reverse them when appropriate.
Doing all of that allows the site to load nice and quickly for legitimate users, and keeps our hosting costs at a reasonable level. I do apologize for the inconvenience when you're banned and you shouldn't have been.
This was the response they sent me:
James,
You were automatically banned for abusing t
he price range filter to get around the 100 results limit. Since you have a solid history of using the site in a way that I wouldn't consider abusive I removed the ban, but please don't do that again. It's ok in small quantities like there are 300 results and you want all of them, but trying to take all the .org sales from the past year wouldn't be an acceptable use. Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience.
Michael Sumner, CEO
NameBio.com
I truly have no idea what they are talking about. I use their service a few times a month. I use no tools or bots, make no tricky maneuvers. I only click on the options they provide.
Right now it looks like they have something available they regret offering and want to blame people from using it.
Pretty sad to blame people from just clicking on what is available AND THEN banning them with no explanation.
Anyone banned should post Nambios reasoning here in this thread. I think they are hurting themselves by banning people instead of posting warnings. Especially when you can't tell if you did something wrong.
Anything we make available gets abused, period. When I changed the Date Range filter to allow users to select any custom range, it took less than two hours before it was being slammed with bots walking back through all the data one day at a time. So I had to switch it back to preset ranges and everybody lost out on a nice feature. Just because we make something available doesn't mean we're ok with it being abused.
The price range filter is an annoying one. I want it there because it is helpful when trying to isolate wholesale or retail sales. And I'm also ok with someone using it occasionally to get around the 100 results limit, like if there are 200-300 results and you want them all that's fine. But when search after search after search is doing that, we ban because it's almost always a bot and even when it isn't it is unwanted activity.
I could prevent everyone from using small price ranges if you like, that's the easiest solution. I personally feel like that would be a step backwards though, like the date ranges. I don't display warnings because that would just allow abusers to go right up to the edge of getting banned every time, and then come back later for more abuse. I like to give bots enough rope to hang themselves. Sure, it snags a few innocent people from time to time, but that's just the nature of it unfortunately.
I'm not sure how you don't know what I'm talking about though. It's not usual activity to want to see all .org sales from the past year between $225 and $250, among various other tiny price ranges, with no other filters used at all. That's almost always someone trying to copy/paste large amounts of data, and even when it isn't it is still suspicious enough that I'm comfortable banning it and reviewing it manually.
Thanks for posting my private email to you and encouraging others to do it as well. If you get banned again I think your email is going to get lost in my spam filter
