

Ask HN: Is Firefox causing me to be IP-banned from HN? - SeanDav

Hi Everyone. I have just been IP banned for the 2nd time in quick succession by HN. No complaint at all about that, in fact I want to thank those that have taken the time to show me logs of what is going on - appreciate your help!<p>I am bombarding HN with HEAD requests and yet from my point of view I am doing absolutely nothing differently in how I have been using HN for years. I use Firefox on Windows 7 64 and generally keep HN open in a tab. Every few minutes, or hours, I manually click on the title to see the latest updates to the front page and comments. Pretty normal useage I would say, and up to now never been a problem.<p>Clearly something is different and my browser, or something else is turning me into a rude user.<p>- Is it possible that keeping HN open in a tab is causing Firefox to send HEAD requests rapidly enough to get me banned?<p>- How can I test this?<p>- Aside from using another browser, how can I avoid this in future?<p>- Is anyone else noticing this sort of behaviour?
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staunch
Type "about:config" in your location bar and then set "network.prefetch-next"
to false. Might help.

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smartwater
Install the plugin "Live HTTP Headers" to see what is being sent and received.

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nandhp
Recent versions of Firefox have a much improved Browser Console (formerly
known as the Error Console, and before that known as the JavaScript Console).
It's like a browser-wide version of the per-page Web Console that showed up
about a year ago. It shows HTTP requests (among many other things), and may be
quite sufficient for diagnosing this problem.

Press Ctrl+Shift+J to open it, or click Firefox -> Web Developer -> Browser
Console.

