***** SurferTim has been banned? ***** [Solved, yay]

SurferTim, has been banned from the Arduino forum?
For being extra generous with his time and in assisting so many with getting their Adrinuo projects working and contributing to the Arduino community.

I hope this has been some inadvertent mistake.

Just to bring it to the attention of the powers that be and to others that may not know, as Tim has no voice.

Regards,
Paul

I assume you are misinformed, I can see his account (and I'm no moderator) and his last post was 31 january 2013 so very recently.

Given his contributions (esp network) I have seen, I cannot imagine he has been banned. His last post I can see look not offensive

Where did you hear/read this?

Hallo Rob,

Almost asleep (past 2am here in Australia) when I got notified of your reply.

Unfortunately Tim was banned on Feb 1st.
I also looked through recent posts and found nothing to provide a hint.
I just happened to have in one of my browser tabs the WebClient code from Tim and went to refresh the tab and his message that he had been banned with no reason given. Yes you can see his account, so I PM'd him a short time ago, but he is not able to reply as he can not log in.
What he was able to do was reply via the playground.

Rob, go here to see Arduino Playground - WebClient
I again replied and provided him my personal email, then posted this message here.

groeten
Paul Alting van Geusau

SurferTim
I assume this is a mistake or a technical problem.
Bans of "real users" are normally announced and discussed in the moderator forum part and I find nothing there.

Best regards
Jantje

Hello SurferTim is not banned.

If he has any problem logging in please email webmaster (at) arduino.cc

m

Good to hear it is a mistake.

Hooray!! I'm not banned any more, at least on my Linux box. My Windows box will not login with the banned message, but that may be a cache issue.

Welcome back to Arduino world Tim.
Please they have pardoned you and you are now out of the 'Arduino clink', a free person again.

Guess you've got some catching up to do eh?

Cheers,
Paul

Thanks, rockwallaby! I have IE on my Windows box working again after clearing cache, cookies, etc. Chrome is still malfunctioning, but I think if I clear out its cache and cookies, it may be ok now too. I don't know what happened, but it is good to be free!! :smiley:

edit: I bumped your Karma for the help getting me free.

Glad to see your back, any idea/explanation why or how this happened? Was it a glitch, account/site hacking, malware/virus or something else?

I presume it must have been a glitch in the database. I tried last night with no luck, but this morning I thought I would try it again, and it worked. ??

edit: This is the message I kept getting until this morning:

An Error Has Occurred!
Sorry SurferTim, you are banned from using this forum!

Welcome back Tim,

I presume it must have been a glitch in the database.

There have been more glitches with the user database last months (seen double user accounts, users with a zero postings counter besides their post,..)
so it is not impossible that it is playing some tricks again.

Thanks, Rob. It is good to be free. I'm tough on the outside, but I'm too old to be in "The Joint". LOL!

I found something interesting while getting all my web browsers back up. All but FireFox would fail the login with the banned message until I cleared the cookies. I cleared both cache and cookies in IE, and it came back to life. I cleared only the cache in Chrome, and it still failed. Then I cleared it's cookies, and it logged in.

It must have been something the database put in my cookies that caused the fail.

Right, that's interesting, just hope it's not contagious :grin:
Thanks Tim for the push on the karma, all warm and fuzzy now.

Cheers,
Paul

It must have been something the database put in my cookies that caused the fail.

Interesting indeed.

shows some cookie crumbles :wink: