Blocking Chrome

Just got a similar e-Mail:

2016/02/19 @ 09:28:23 pm

Request URI: /?blackhole=e9ef8840d4
IP Address: REDACTED
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.89 Safari/537.36

Whois Lookup:

Deferred to specific whois server: whois.ripe.net…

% This is the RIPE Database query service.
% The objects are in RPSL format.
%
% The RIPE Database is subject to Terms and Conditions.
% See https://www.ripe.net/db/support/db-terms-conditions.pdf

%ERROR:106: no search key specified
%
% No search key specified

% This query was served by the RIPE Database Query Service version 1.85.1 (DB-3)

@geopal:

Actually that’s not how it works. The plugin only blocks by IP address. Not by User Agent. No Chrome users are blocked except for the one person or bot who is reported as using Chrome. Again, this plugin does not block by User Agent, only by IP.

@michael:

That error comes from the geo-lookup service and just means that there was an error with the IP lookup. There is not much to be done about it, but understand that it does not affect the functionality of the plugin. It just means that a lookup fails, which is to be expected every now and then. If it keeps happening for every lookup, then please let me know; there are other lookup services that we can try as alternates.

Thanks for the feedback from both of you.

I am seeing something similar. After getting two email reports of bad bots blocked, we started receiving emails from our users that they’ve been banned from the site. When logged-out, I am also getting banned on my Chrome.

Clearing page cache and varnish does not solve the issue. Only when I deleted the two “bad bots” from the list, were I able to access the site again. It seems that the “IP based filtering” either doesn’t work, or the user agent detection is mistreating my Chrome for a bad bot’s user agent…

I am deactivating the plugin for now… just to be on the safe side…

Hi Bowo, the plugin only blocks IP addresses. So if your visitors are visiting the Blackhole, they are going to get blocked. Again, the plugin does not block by user agent, so there is no way that Chrome would be blocked. It’s all based on IP address.

Thanks Jeff. I will test the plugin again on another occasion. It is still an attractive solution. I just don’t want to take any risk on this particular site, and it appears that the performance issue we had earlier is not caused by bad bots, so we are good for now.

Hi, I’ve been having the same issue as posted by Michael and Bowo. First, when I installed the plugin I tested the link and it just delivered the page with the message, since I was logged-in it was easy to clear my IP, but after I logged-out I was denied access, so I had to remove the plugin and still suffering the same problem. To make things worse, the day that I activated the plugin pretty much everybody had access denied, including authors and user of the blog, I got word of the problem thanks to my readers. Since then I tried several other times to re-activate the plugin but the problem still remains.
Also, there are blaclisted IPs that I’m not able to remove using the plugin settings.
Regards EGA

Hi abulaye, it sounds like you are running a caching plugin, correct? If so, Blackhole is not yet compatible (but will be in a future update). I recommend uninstalling until the plugin is compatible. Uninstalling will remove all plugin settings and all blacklisted IP addresses.

Hi Jeff, thanks for replying, I don’t have yet activated any caching plugin yet, but the host that I use does have Varnish Caching. So I will wait until you got that new version. Thanks a lot for your advice
Regards EGA