Hi,
I haven’t logged in to the forum for a while. Today when I entered my credentials a message appeared telling me I could not log in from that IP address. I was using ExpressVPN so I disabled it and was able to log in.
I saw in this category of the forum that there was an attack on the forum. Am I correct that this is expected and the way of the future?
No problems logging in while using a VPN here. VPN IP addresses are frequently blacklisted, especially the free services for a plethora of reasons, but it can happen to reputable paid VPNs as well. When you encounter that you can try changing servers a few times, otherwise, yeah, you'll need to disable it.
I'm not an admin, but the recent attack was thwarted by disabling new users from posting immediately after registering. I don't think the fix had anything to do with IP addresses. I have not heard that VPNs are being blocked.
Can you quote the message (and provide the URL)?
When I ban spammers, I generally block them and their IP.
Maybe you just got unlucky and were assigned the same IP as a spammer used.
I would be amazed if spambots/spammers did not always use a VPN, and I would expect spammers to want to blend in with the crowd via cycling through VPN IP addresses that are used by many other users. If that is correct, that would mean that a targeted site might well be repeatedly blocking IP addresses to no avail against what is a moving target, with the only result being erosion of available IP addresses for valid users of commercial VPN services... or so it seems to me.
“you may be right” (to quote Tonya Engst). However it's academic since it is what Discourse does more or less by default so it's the result.