WebmasterWorld.com blocking ISPs?

Is my ISP banned from accessing the site?

[wackybrit]

Most people complain about being blocked or dropped by Google.. but bizarrely I'm asking about getting blocked by WebmasterWorld.com itself.

I have a server on the Internet, and other than hosting sites, I also have a Web proxy on it. This is because my ISP (in the UK) has a horrible transparent proxy on port 80 which mucks things up, and also logs all port 80 access thanks to EU laws. I used to be able to access Webmasterworld.com perfectly through my server's proxy. Then all of a sudden, I got 403 Forbidden errors all the time.

I did a wget to check, and still got a 403. I then did a wget from another server on a totally different subnet (but with the same network provider) and still got 403 errors for requesting ANY page at WebmasterWorld.com.

So, it seems WebmasterWorld has banned my server ISP from accessing the site! Anyone know why this might be? It seems totally bizarre, and is a bit annoying :-)

Is this one to submit in the 'bug reports'? It's not really a bug, but it behaves like one if I didn't know (from connecting other ways) that Webmasterworld.com is still working perfectly..

[peter@server peter]$ wget [webmasterworld.com...]
--06:59:50-- [webmasterworld.com...]
=> `index.html'
Connecting to www.webmasterworld.com:80... connected!
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden
06:59:50 ERROR 403: Forbidden.

[Brett_Tabke]

no - we've banned wget.

[wackybrit]

Thanks for that Brett. It must be some funkiness in my proxy then.. and relying on wget kinda threw me off the course :-) I guess it makes sense now actually, if people were trying to mirror the site or something.