For whatever reason, I was blocked from connecting to the forum starting on Monday, December 30 2013 at about 8:00 PM (U.S. EST).
I was composing a reply to a post and when I hit the Post Reply button I got a strange message something to the effect: Forbidden, you must be logged in to post...
I thought that was strange since I was already logged in. So I tried it again with the same result. I tried to navigate to other pages on the site and my browser (IE9) would just time-out and return the message: This page can't be displayed. So, I left the site for the night.
Tried connecting to the site several times on Tuesday, December 31 2013 but still got the same message: This page can't be displayed.
Ok, WTH is going on here?
I did a Google search and found a site that will test ping another site to see if that site is online or is offline.
http://www.isitdownrightnow.com
Pretty cool. Never knew anything like that existed.
Ok, that site reported that ExcelForum.com was online. So, that meant that I either had a connection problem or that I was banned or blocked from the site.
I was able to connect to every other site I tried so I figured it wasn't a browser problem or an ISP problem so that meant it had to be either that I was banned from the site or blocked from the site for whatever reason.
I couldn't think of any reason why I would have been banned so it must be that I was being blocked from the site for whatever reason.
I remember reading a post somewhere on the site pertaining to being unable to connect to the site with instructions on how to get help from the site admin.
So, if this ever happens to you do this...
See if the site is online:
http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/excelforum.com.html
If the site is online but you still can't connect, send an email message to the site admin:
[email protected]
Let them know that you can't access the site and give them your IP address.
You can get your IP address by going here:
http://www.whatismyip.com/
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