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First of all hello MAL community.

3~4 days ago my brother, who is currently living in Peru, told me he couldnt acces the MAL site; i thought it would get fixed after a while, but it seems like he still cant. I told him to try from my other brother's laptop but the issue still remained. He also tried turning off nod32, different browsers but still nothing, so we thought it might be an IP block. Does anyone know of someone else who is having the same problem? Any help is welcomed.

Thanks in advance.

Hey Hakurouken, I have the exact same problem, only I think I lost access starting on Monday the 14th, and I'm from Romania.
I've been browsing the site regularly since quite a while ago and I've never had any problems accessing the site, but some days ago I suddenly couldn't enter the site anymore. The browser loads for a while with a blank window, and then it gives the "connection timed out" error.
Right now, I'm using TorBrowser to write this post, and search through the forums, maybe I can find some help on IRC as well, so I really think it's a sort of IP block, though I can't understand why it happened so suddenly.
Any admins have any suggestions, or possible solutions? I'd really rather not have to use Tor, it's a bit of a hassle, but I also really love browsing myanimelist!

Update:
Well I've tried looking for help on IRC, but apparently I've been banned for my troubles, even though I only posted 3 lines of text and nobody replied. Tough luck, I guess.

@andreii: That was because you used !LIST which is not allowed in the channel (see channel topic for the rules).

Back to topic: Certain IP ranges are blocked, see here for more information:
http://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=320769
The main problem seems to be IP addresses starting with 176 and 177.

Since your problems only started recently hopefully both of you have dynamic IPs and can change them (restart your router) until you get one that isn't blocked.

You did !list when the topic explicitly said you shouldn't.

I've unbanned you. You can try again.

Thank you both for your timely replies.
You are, of course, correct regarding my IRC ban. In my unwilling stupidity, waiting for someone to reply in the chat room, I misread the topic and typed "!LIST" out of curiosity (I've not used IRC much before) without noticing the "DO NOT" that preceded it. So, I apologize for my mistake and thank you kindly for unbanning me.

Regarding the main topic though, I've followed the instructions in the thread you've directed me to, did the traceroute to your website and it timed out at 72.172.66.30, just like it said there, so it seems I am indeed "being blocked by the blacklist on the border routers at mal's data center".
However, whatismyip.org says my IP consistently starts with 5.12. and the two additional numbers change after each router restart, so I'm nowhere near having an IP address that starts with 175 and 176. I've done 4 restarts now and still no access to your website. Is there any way to make a more solid change in my IP? Should I just keep going with the restarts?

I have to admit I don't have much formal knowledge regarding networking and such, so I'd like to ask whether you might have any other suggestions which might help me to solve the issue.
I've pondered contacting my ISP for help, but I honestly don't know what to even ask. Could they somehow make a more significant change in my IP? And would they do that just because I want to?
Any ideas, hints or suggestions are very much appreciated.

So, I take it there's no chance whatsoever of getting my IP whitelisted or something of the sort? Is there nothing that could be done on your end to lift my ban? Or would that be too much of a hassle for just one or two users?

I have the same problem as Hakurouken.
Last time I use my computer to log here was 2-3 days ago, but was a problem and the computer closed suddenly. Then I accessed MAL from a Laptop with a modem and is work perfect.
But from yesterday I can acces myanimelist from my computer if... I can access it from phone, from modem but not from my PC IP.

(I forgot to specific that this site is the only one I can see, yesterday was pixiv to but today i can see)
my ip is 5.13.78.182

Thanks in advance.

my ip is 5.13.212.238 why cant i load the page ?? i had to use a uk ip im from romania !

All three of us are from Romania Saybarnet, you, Rwka and me. And I assume, by our similar IPs, that we all have the same ISP as well: RDS-RCS.
If you'll read the other posts in this thread, you'll understand that this IP range that we have, 5.12 - 5.13, is blacklisted by myanimelist, for some sort of security reasons.
However, because I have a feeling that our IP range won't be removed from the blacklist just because a couple of users have issues, we're just going to have to use proxies to access the site.

For everyone who has this problem:

If you have a dynamic IP try getting a new one which hopefully isn't blocked. To change your IP you need to reconnect, for example restart your router. If you don't know if you have a dynamic IP: restart your router and see if the IP changes.
Try it several times, maybe there are several IPs blocked (but others aren't).

To find out your public IP you can use whatismyip.com.

If you have a static IP or the new IPs are all blocked, do the following:

Read this post. Then, send me a PM with your traceroute and public IP.

If I can verify that you are blocked by mal and not by something else, I can try to forward it to be whitelisted. As said in the other post, there's no guarantee though.

Hey Luna, thanks for trying to help
I do have a dynamic IP (and I assume all three of us do, having the same ISP), but trying to reset the IP doesn't help because it doesn't change the IP enough. For example, it changes from 5.12.80.187 to 5.12.60.93. No matter how many resets I do it doesn't leave the 5.12 range, which is obvious to me that it's what the block is based on. I've asked several friends who also have the same ISP as me, and consequently have their IPs in the same 5.12 range, and none of them can access myanimelist.
So, that's why forwarding a specific IP to get whitelisted won't help. I mean, for example, if my IP is now 5.12.60.93, and it somehow manages to get whitelisted, if I ever need to restart my router, the IP will change to something else in the 5.12 range and I'll be blocked again.
So, you'd need to somehow remove the block for the entire range, but if, as you say, whitelisting even just a specific IP is improbable, I doubt whitlisting an entire range will ever happen.

However, I'm going to ask around some more because I'm curios to find out just how widespread this problem is among Romanian users. If it's as I think, and basically everybody who has my ISP is being blocked (my ISP, RDS-RCS, being the largest ISP in our country), than that's a lot of users, current and future ones, possibly being blocked, and therefore might warrant further consideration on the part of those responsible for all this IP blocking stuff. Or, at least, that's what I think.

Sure, for dynamic IPs I'll forward a larger range. But I still need one IP to find out the range. Since some of you posted their IPs here I already know this range, but the person the OP was talking about is living in Peru, so it's most probably unrelated to your ISP and I still need something from him.

I was talking with another Romanian user yesterday and he confirmed that many more users with this ISP are blocked. I think I have enough information now to forward this issue. Let's hope that it gets solved.

Yeah, fingers crossed. Thanks Luna.

Ok so i found something that fixed my problem ! If you change you windos start bar from clasic to normal it changes your ip class i dont know why its wirde but it worked for me you guys give it a try hope it helps !

There is no reason changing to/from windows classic would effect it. That was surely a coincidence.

If it's stopping at 72.172.66.30 that means you're getting blocked at crave's router and not the one for the data center. I'm not sure what prompted the block in the first place, but most likely there was some undesirable traffic originating from the range at some point. We'll let crave know about it and hopefully it can be lifted.

Well I can certainly understand the motivation behind blocking the entire range. If just a single person who shares my IP range (i.e. shares my ISP) needs to be blocked from the site because of malicious activity or something of the sort, you'd really have no other alternative than blocking out the entire range, because otherwise he could just reset his IP. I guess having 'collateral victims' of the block is just an unavoidable flaw of using dynamic IPs.
Do please let me know if either the matter gets resolved, or it's decided that the block has to be kept.

Thanks to a short power outage my IP changed and begging with 188....
I don't understand way my all restarts to router or computer didn't work but a simple power yes. (like andreii say my IP changet the same to after all restart/reset).

Thanks and success in solving the problem.

I'm glad to hear you've managed to solve the problem on your end, Rwka. I've tried your suggestion but, unfortunately, even though I've left my router unplugged for a whole hour I'm still in the 5.12 range.

This might be a bit farfetched but I'm thinking maybe your power outage struck a larger part of your city and so maybe it included your ISP HQ, thus changing your IP range because their machines had also rebooted. Like I've said before, I don't have much knowledge about networking stuff so I don't know how plausible this might be.

However, what I do find interesting is that both you and Saybarnet have managed to switch from 5.12 to the same 188 IP range (he PMed me about it and mentioned his new IP range, though I still don't know how he managed to do it). More specifically, he said his IP range was 188.25 now, is that the same as you?

No, my IP range is 188.27
Maybe is a coincidence, is he for Bucharest? (I don't know how much area covered, was only one second)

I'm unsure of what to make of the silence regarding the progress of solving this issue. I'm a patient man, so I really don't mind having to wait, but I'd at least like to know the reason for the wait. Is it because:
a) You simply haven't found the time yet to ask crave about this?
b) You haven't managed to reach crave yet to ask him?
c) You have asked, but a decision is still being debated?
d) You have asked, but the answer was "no"?
Thanks!