Just wanted to keep everyone in the loop. If you encounter an issue where you cannot post or comment, but voting is functioning correctly, it is most likely because we have implemented a block for VPN & Tor users. If you are using these services, you can still take part in activities such as voting, reporting posts, and performing other passive actions on the site. We implemented this restriction because of users posting illegal content.
See https://lemmy.world/post/11571711
While we value our users’ right to privacy, we also prioritize the protection of both ourselves and our users. We want to emphasize that we weigh the pros and cons of restrictions like these with the entire team. We do not take these actions lightly, and we hope everyone understands the reasoning behind it.
That’s a bummer that CSAM is still being posted. I get that y’all need to stop the people posting it immediately, and I agree with whatever you need to do to make that happen. However, I hope you can find a solution later down the road that allows VPN users to continue fully interacting with the site.
Indeed. I don’t use the Internet at all without a VPN connected. These days you can’t possibly be blocking people for that reason. There are other ways to find child porn or whatever. Like calling the authorities.
I hope there’s a useful error message, that could be very annoying to troubleshoot.
We did include a meaningful response body to help.
I image with how techy and fos lemmy tends to be, I’m sure there’s a ton of people using VPNs, so a lot of people will probably run into that issue.
It’ll come up in a curl or httpie request. All our WAF errors have meaningful returns, I make sure of it ❤️
I know I’m late to the party here, but sadly there is nothing obvious if you are on a desktop browser. The only feedback you get is an endless spinning gear.
I just found this post from a search and I’m sad I can’t connect with a VPN. :(
Ah, yeah, I wish there was a better way to let clients and browsers know. I’ll add a note to the sidebar at least.
What do you mean when you say a “response body”? What is it ? Does it show anywhere in a browser ?
How detailed is .world’s IP logging? I’m sure many privacy-minded users think that’s important to know before disabling their VPNs.
Additionally, would it be possible to allow posts/comments that don’t have any links or images? Or does even that introduce too much risk?
Since lemmy.world is on cloudflare, a worker function could disallow images in comments (or POST to any of the routes that create content) from those IP ranges. I assume the driver here is CSAM and other problematic imagery.
We’ve looked into worker functions before for other things like routing on the edge (neat stuff). We’re all DevOps folks, and love to get feedback from the community ❤️
The issue is even folks linking to images unfortunately. Yeah, it’s mostly CSAM related, but also prevents other types of abuse as well.
I appreciate everyone being understanding, all of us try hard to keep everyone on LW (and folks we federate with) safe.
All my devices and networks are constantly on VPN, it’s just basic obscurity, and it’s such a hassle posting on Lemmy now - my activity is probably down 90%.
Could you please consider allowing basic text posts and / or comments from behind a VPN? You could even disallow all markdown - that’s a decent trade off for my sake.
But please don’t just block all VPN usage if there are options you have not explored yet.
Yeah, my main thought was if the body contains any kind of URI/url from those IP sources, you could drop it as you are now. Or possibly just
