
Ask HN: How can I set up an Instagram account if I keep getting Instabanned? - richrichardsson
This must seem like the dumbest question ever, but every time I try to set up an account for my business via the website, I get &quot;Something went wrong please try again later.&quot;  Then when I try again later it tells me the email&#x2F;username has been taken (I&#x27;m running out of ideas for usernames now that make sense for the business).  If I try logging in with the supposed failed sign up credentials I get told that the account has been banned for violating the terms &amp; conditions (not sure how I can violate the T&amp;Cs without ever having logged in or even successfully sign up).
Visiting the help pages for Instagram gives some promising forms to fill in, but upon submitting I get a &quot;This page does not exist.&quot; error showing up.<p>I did manage somehow to get hold of a human, perhaps via support@instagram.com, but they told me to go see the help pages and fill in the broken forms, and when I replied that they are broken they told me &quot;I cannot help you through this channel&quot;.  (so much for &quot;support&quot;)<p>The help pages mention that to appeal a banned account I must use the App, but I don&#x27;t really feel like installing the App given how useless the experience has been so far.  Is this <i>really</i> the only way I can resolve this?<p>Any ideas on how I can get this fixed, help me please HN!
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danuker
Are you behind a proxy? Firewall? Ad blocker?

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richrichardsson
I have a PiHole, I'll try disabling it and signing up (yet again!)

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richrichardsson
Holy crap! That was it.

There is nothing in the T&Cs to say you may not use an ad blocker, what planet
are they on to think that breaking their sign up process if you _do_ have an
ad blocker is a good idea?

Thanks for the help!

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dylz
There are multiple sites that will block your access completely if they detect
an ad blocker - that isn't ad related.

I contribute to the EasyPrivacy list a bit, and there are a number of sites
that do massive device fingerprinting, loading Java, Windows Media, attempting
to livestream, enumerate your ports with websockets, port scan your LAN after
getting your LAN subnet via WebRTC, if you refuse any of these your account is
flagged as fraud.

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noir_lord
With all this stuff you get to a point where you think Stallman retrieving
pages and emailing them to himself was the smart move.

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dylz
I would be unsurprised if Instagram was collecting a lot more than just this,
but the web-login for Facebook used to use websockets to portscan VNC/RDP/etc
ports on localhost in addition to all the fingerprinting and enumeration, so
this entire situation wasn't exactly surprising

