Dave, I beg to disagree here.
Your quotes in italics...
As I mentioned, there's no guaranty your ISP will admit any involvement.
There is no guarantee they won't try to assist either. They did investigate with me for two hours. To say the service standards of the ISP here and the ISP in Germany are both poor and they would want to cover up any involvement is surely stretching it a bit?
Note also, this was one thing I investigated further at the time - we have numerous ISP and I contacted two other people with different ISP. They could not get onto the site. Both people were also in the IT industry and conducted their own investigations, with no result. And as we are all involved in cybersecurity, we then out of interest jointly conducted a quick root cause analysis - with no conclusion.
I also doubt that the German and 3 South African ISP's are interfering with the sites in a similar fashion. The German users also are maybe using different ISP to each other.
Another thing it could be, is a blanket IP block made by this site.
I cannot comment here. As I said if I really had any concrete idea I would have come forth with a suggestion it is looked at. This is, however, a logical suggestion and could be looked into as a possible cause, depending on the approach the Site Administrators adopt.
You don't know if your issue, is the same issue as any of the fellows from Germany...or France.
You are assuming you are all experiencing exactly the same issue.
Equally, we do not know that issue is different for Germany or South Africa. So far it sounds identical given the following...
- More then one user in each country is affected.
- The effects on the users are the same.
I would say
the issue has the same cause. I put that last bit in bold because while the effects are same, currently I have access while Germany does not. So it is not the same concurrent issue obviously.
I have seen little on the French experience, so cannot comment on whether their experience also seems to be the same or not. Do you have more detail on the French experience?
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incidentally at the time, I discussed it a briefly in passing with Rick on Discord. If you are interested and want to go back there you will see some of the checks and steps I took at the time. These are not the only steps taken though - there were many more.
In the end, I never raised the matter here as far as I was aware at the time I was the only person affected and I also in the end still had (and have) no reasonable idea as to the cause. And without a reasonably concrete feeling as to a possible cause, I do not wish to waste any of the administrators time.