The forum here has a new feature - if you attempt to log in with an incorrect password more than 5 times your IP address will be banned, making it impossible to login in future from that IP address.
The intention of this is to stop people running automated password-cracking attempts, where they attempt to log in (with a script) by trying thousands of times.
Once you have logged in successfully, your failed attempts (for that IP address) are wiped from the database. Thus you have another 5 attempts available next time.
The failures are recorded by IP address, to stop a denial-of-service attack (where someone might deliberately log in to a known user, and fail, to cause that account to be blocked). Thus only that IP address is blocked from logging in.
Once you have reached the limit the error message will change from "That username/password combination is not on file" to "That TCP/IP address is not permitted to log on". After that, that particular IP address cannot be used to log onto the forum for 24 hours.
You could change to a computer with a different IP address, and post a message on the forum along the lines of:
Verification of your failed attempts will precede any clearing of the block.
Or simply wait 24 hours before trying again.
The intention of this is to stop people running automated password-cracking attempts, where they attempt to log in (with a script) by trying thousands of times.
Once you have logged in successfully, your failed attempts (for that IP address) are wiped from the database. Thus you have another 5 attempts available next time.
The failures are recorded by IP address, to stop a denial-of-service attack (where someone might deliberately log in to a known user, and fail, to cause that account to be blocked). Thus only that IP address is blocked from logging in.
Once you have reached the limit the error message will change from "That username/password combination is not on file" to "That TCP/IP address is not permitted to log on". After that, that particular IP address cannot be used to log onto the forum for 24 hours.
You could change to a computer with a different IP address, and post a message on the forum along the lines of:
"Please clear the unsuccessful logins recorded against my username".
Verification of your failed attempts will precede any clearing of the block.
Or simply wait 24 hours before trying again.