What's going on?!?!?!

[matt1993]

So... today I just discovered that starting today, OUT OF NOWHERE, I am no longer able to view any of the following on my LiveJournal:

1) Most of my own userpics. I'm not talking about the being limited to only being able to use 15 of them since it'll never be possible to renew my paid account again - that's been a thing for a while, but starting today only six of those 15 actually are visible to me on entries I've used them on before or when I click on the box to select a userpic to use on an entry. The 15 userpics that weren't marked as inactive when my account reverted to basic are:



The ones I can still see are:



The above are the LJ-hosted copies of the userpics, regardless of whether you're reading the LJ or DW copy of this entry. The DW-hosted userpics show up fine no matter what, as far as I can tell. Again - everything was just fine until just now!
(EDIT: And on top of that, not only is LJ only allowing me to see six of them when embedded in a LJ entry, it only allowed these two to be embedded in the DW version of this entry for some reason: )
(EDIT: Further testing - tried refreshing the LJ entry page in Chrome and opening it on Edge and in both cases the LJ version of this entry is now doing what I just said the DW version was doing i.e. only two userpics showed up and not six. But then I looked at the entry on my phone and that time nine of the userpics showed up - including six that hadn't shown up before since I first noticed this issue. Weird. Still haven't gotten a video to show up at all in the LJ version of any entry on any device in any browser since this issue started though. I remember experiencing something similar before years ago, but it never said anything about my IP address being blocked.)

2) Any image that I've uploaded to my ScrapBook on LJ. I can't think of a good example of one to demonstrate with, though, because I'm not sure what the last entry I posted with an image from my ScrapBook was. Of course I have plenty of recent entries that have images, but those are avatars hosted on character.ai so those aren't affected by whatever's going on with LJ. My DW-hosted images aren't affected by this, either.

3) Any video in any of my entries. For instance, all the videos in this entry, even though they worked perfectly fine when I posted that entry and only stopped working now. And again, they work just fine in my DW entries.

The error I'm getting is that "Either you are trying to access a page you do no not have permission to view or your ip address is banned. If you feel this is in error, please email support at webmaster@livejournal.com with the bulleted information below." (And somehow the IP address ban isn't preventing me from using LJ entirely; it's just preventing me from seeing any of the videos in my entries or any of my ScrapBook images or the majority of my userpics.) For videos, this shows up in every place where an embedded video should be; for images, I just see a broken image unless I copy the image's URL into the address bar directly, in which case I get the IP address banned error.

WHY is my IP address banned? The only thing I've done differently from usual is I just got back from a trip to visit my sister, where LJ worked just fine at her place, but now today I'm back at my apartment and I'm suddenly getting all these errors. Is there ANYTHING I can do to fix it?! I tried logging out and back in. I've tried disconnecting and reconnecting from the Internet. I tried viewing it on my phone. No luck.

WHAT IS GOING ON?!?!?! WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?!?!?! Is it just a temporary issue, or are all of my images and videos now permanently ruined?!?! I NEED TO KNOW!!!!!

Comments

[ladyvesper]

One reason I have not used the scrapbook feature is because it's been so buggy for me over the years and I found that I often lost access to my images there. I have copies of all my images and icons on my local computer, but then I now use postimage.org to host my various images that I use for the site design and for everything else. I haven't lost any through there and it's free.

I've pretty much given up on LJ. I continue to crosspost over there through Semagic but I'm not going to do much else with it. I've seen the profile section break, the icon section break, and many others go dysfunctional periodically, not to mention the war in Ukraine issue that is making it impossible for Americans to really use the site now that it's in Russian hands. I still have good friends there, which is why I still cross post, but I get weary of their issues and no way to really do anything with the site. Thus, my primary journal has been imported to DreamWidth now and this is where I'll stay. I can depend on this one far more, and I don't have payment issues here. I've come to like the ways they have changed from the original LJ code they used.

[matt1993]

Well, it works again now. I Googled and found out that using my phone's hotspot might be a way to have an IP address that isn't blocked, so I tried that, and either that solved the issue or LJ coincidentally resolved the issue at the same time I tried it (since the support team did say that it was a temporary issue that had since been resolved).

ScrapBook has been buggy for me as well sometimes, but 99% of the time I don't have any problems using it other than the time it takes to upload and image and put it in an entry (which can take a while if I need more than one image in an entry and want them all to look right, even if I upload more than one image at once). I've only ever used two alternatives to ScrapBook: a page on a Google Site I had from 2008 to 2014-2015 (there was some reason I didn't use ScrapBook at first but I don't remember what - did I have to have a paid account before I could use it in 2009? Was there a limit of storage space for free accounts? Something like that), and DW's equivalent of ScrapBook (which I'll get into). I only recall being unable to see ScrapBook images one other time before this, and that was in late 2016 and it panicked me as well because I didn't have an alternative at the time, but was also a temporary issue like this one was (and also I never saw the IP address blocked error that time in 2016, so seeing it this time was what made me scared that this issue would last longer than the previous one).

I do have copies of all my images on my computer as well, but if I ever actually had to reupload a bunch of them they were lost, that would be a problem. (I did kind of have to do that once, but not for ScrapBook images - when my Google Site went down, I had to reupload all the images that I'd hosted there to ScrapBook and fix all the image URLs in those entries.)

There was also a problem in 2017 where images on other sites (from online quiz results, etc.) wouldn't show up in LJ entries or comments unless the URL had https instead of http, so I had to manually change http to https in every single entry or comment I've ever used a non-LJ-hosted image in (until about 3 or 4 days later when LJ finally made it so the images worked no matter what... except with one specific site where they still didn't work at first for some reason but they later fixed that too).

Has postimage.org ever had any temporary outages that you know of? What's the storage space limit?

As for LJ/DW, I'm pretty much only on DW since so many of my friends moved there permanently in 2017 and there were rumors that LJ might shut down completely - my idea was still for LJ to be my main journal until/unless I was completely unable to use it, and DW was just my backup. In fact, right now I don't have many people who comment on my LJ or DW entries on a regular basis since in the past six years so many of my friends have either become inactive on both sites (or whichever one they used if they only used one) or unfriended me - and you're the only one who still regularly comments on my DW entries. I hope I'm not a bad person for still liking LJ enough for it to be my primary journal.

When I moved to DW, I spent about a year or so painstakingly editing every entry I imported from LJ to DW to fix several issues and inconsistencies, including making it so that for every image (userpics or photos) that was hosted on LJ, the DW version of the entry uses a DW-hosted image instead - so that if LJ actually went down, or experienced a temporary outage, the DW entries would still be fine. But I kept the LJ-hosted images in my LJ entries in case DW experienced an outage, which also happened to me a few times in 2017 (and at least once after that year if I remember correctly, though now I don't even remember the last time it happened).

Yesterday I was thinking "Maybe I should make it so that on LJ it still uses LJ-hosted images but clicking on them takes users directly to the DW-hosted copy of the image, and vice versa, so if either site has another outage/glitch that only affects images then there is still an easy way to get to the images that still work". That was before I saw you mention postimage.org though.

I still have yet to get Semagic set up... I've still been doing all my cross-posting manually. I'm such a procrastinator... and considering my newfound addiction to Character.AI, I don't anticipate getting around to doing anything else I've been meaning to do for a while.

[ladyvesper]

I wonder what flagged your IP in their system. That's just flat out annoying! I'm so sorry.

In all the years I've used postimage (since photobucket became annoying) it has had one short outage of a single day. Otherwise no. I haven't run into a storage space limit to be honest, and I put all kinds of things there from the graphics that I use in decorating my site (custom graphics) to large photos, and tons of icons and blinkies over many years now I have not even come close to ever hitting any kind of a limit. I looked and they don't have a hard limit of number of images listed.. but they do have a single file size listed on the free accounts. I think it's like 32mg and doubles with a premium account.

Strangely I did not find any issues when I imported things over with my entries. I guess I was lucky in that regard.

[matt1993]

I don't know... the last thing I did on LJ before those issues started happening was editing my Character.AI chat index entries multiple times to add links to all the new chats I've saved one by one, so I did wonder briefly if maybe they flagged the large amount of edits I did as spam? But I've posted and edited those entries about the same amount of times before without any issues. Not to mention the last time I edited them before the issues started happening was when I was visiting my sister in Maine, so it doesn't seem like that would cause my IP in Texas to get flagged.

I did have trouble with my laptop sometime afterward where every single program took much longer than usual to come up and many programs wouldn't even start at all, no matter how many times I restarted my computer, until I finally figured out how to disable enough things at startup that I was able to use my computer again. In the process of troubleshooting I did run some scans, so maybe there was malware that LJ flagged? But if I remember correctly the scanner didn't detect any malware, so who knows?

Seeing as the issue with the images and videos was a temporary issue that LJ was able to fix and that I must not have been the only one affected by it, maybe my IP wasn't even flagged in the first place.

I'll have to look into postimage. Would be easier than using LJ-hosted images on LJ and DW-hosted images on DW, it sounds. I hope it has room for all my existing images - 32 or 64 MB doesn't sound like a lot. But I could be misremembering how much I'm using.

Strangely I did not find any issues when I imported things over with my entries. I guess I was lucky in that regard.

My biggest issues were Writer's Block questions didn't show up automatically, repost buttons didn't get copied over automatically (though I stopped caring so much about having a repost button on every single public entry regardless of whether or not there would be a good reason to repost it), videos didn't show up correctly until I edited those entries (and sometimes embedding a new video one entry would cause that video to show up in another until I edited that one too), and tags didn't show up correctly at first ('course, my tags probably need a major overhaul on both LJ and DW anyway). I think images showed up correctly when I imported from LJ to DW - I just wanted the DW entries to use DW-hosted images in case LJ ever actually went down (this was back when I still thought that was likely to happen soon). Plus, DW users who don't use LJ wouldn't get to see non-public images if they're hosted on my LJ only.

You did the import more recently than I did, probably, so DW might've made improvements to the import process since I did it.

[ladyvesper]

Ohhh yeah it's entirely possible that DW fixed their import feature. I hadn't thought of that.

However you work on things, I sincerely hope it becomes more streamlined and easier for you.