[AC-Admins] ANTHROCHAT.NET: banned on VPN

[Simba]

On 3/17/19 10:53 AM, nettenhund at tutanota.de wrote:
> I tried to reconnect to Anthrochat on a VPN recently and it seems to 
> say I'm banned, but only when I use the VPN. Is there a proper 
> way/sasl I need to do in order to connect on a VPN?

     In general, it is preferred that people connect from their own,
actual IP addresses because those trying to obscure where they're coming
from are usually the same ones trying to circumvent bans and otherwise
be obnoxious.  That's one of the reasons that RBLs typically utilized by
IRC networks include Tor exit nodes.

     In specific, your VPN addresses were all part of a massive, spammy
botnet, that was incessantly and systematically joining every channel
and repeating the same set of messages, each time obscured slightly
differently with unicode character substitutions.  Those bots connected
from some 30,000 unique IP addresses - and those were just the ones that
I caught and added to our RBL.  Many of the connections were already on
other RBLs that we utilize, so the number was probably closer to 50,000
or more.

     It went on, non-stop, for a couple of months.  Then, more recently,
many of them came back, at a much higher frequency, but thankfully, a
lot of them were already banned from the last time.  Plus, the messages
that they were sending weren't rotating out unicode characters, so a
spamfilter was able to nail the rest.

     Anyway, the bottom line is:  Your VPN is compromised by spammers
and I would prefer to not unban its IP addresses.

     Given that user mode +x is on by default, your address is already
obscured by the server, and the only people you're "hiding from", by
using a VPN, are the AnthroChat admins.  If you're worried that the
normal obfuscation doesn't hide enough from normal users, just request a
vanity hostmask, using hostserv.

-- 
Simba