(Someone else writing) I got banned...

[Som1Lse]

...not by MH or BP, but by the host.

The temporary solution we've come up with is that I get this fancy new account, to use through Tor, and maybe the host will fix the issue. Otherwise I'll probably contact my ISP and get a new IP address.

So yes this account does belong to Someone else. (even though the profile may say otherwise)

[Simoneon]

I'm pretty sure there's a possibility to merge the accounts. 

[Gespenst]

that means that everyone might get that banana? Ow that god

[Silverthorn]

Yeah, so, as it turns out, the host has started to ban those IPs that refresh pages really fast or browse somewhat "inhumanly" (or however this is supposed to be).

The sign that the host has blocked you is that your request either times out or that the connection has been reset. You can double-check by entering the command prompt (aka. [windows-key]+[R] > cmd; no idea how it's on mac) and entering "tracert lf-empire.de". If the request gets stuck at something with "alfahosting", then you're affected.

Possible solutions: so far, hope that you have some sort of dynamic IP. If it gets banned, restart your router which should (hopefully) fix it. As for static IPs, the only solution so far seems to be getting behind proxy servers / using Tor.

Looks like one has to get into contact with the glorious admins that run the servers

[Som1Lse]

Just announcing that it has been fixed. Som1Lse will probably be merged with this account now.

[Silverthorn]

Alright, I now know the reason why this happened in first place. The host's firewall noticed an enormous amount of connections coming from single IP-addresses. Usually, this can't be done humanly, and this was not the case here either (although I sometimes get the feeling that @Someone else does crazy stuff ).

For a day or so, I had a quite buggy overview running on the index-page (the thing with the tiny text). If you kept your browser open, this overview usually crashed it after ~40 minutes. The thing created more and more connections and eventually fried cables (I received an excerpt from the host's logs that indicated that one single IP sent the same request 12 times a second, possibly even more). Or something comparable.

Tl;dr: Overview that was temporarily in place is responsible for these bans. It has been replaced by the much more stable one again, so this should not happen again.