Error 403 – unable to access Macintosh Garden anymore

[Elosha]

Good day,

Whatever I try (various cable ISPs or VPN), I am not able to access The Macintosh Garden anymore. Always getting a HTTP 403 error. I've seen it temporarily in the past, but now it is permanent since months.

I've read that it is Macintosh Garden's method of protecting against bots … but currently it's just preventing humans from accessing. And I've always been a very modest user.

Help please

 

[fogWraith]

Good day,

Whatever I try (various cable ISPs or VPN), I am not able to access The Macintosh Garden anymore. Always getting a HTTP 403 error. I've seen it temporarily in the past, but now it is permanent since months.

I've read that it is Macintosh Garden's method of protecting against bots … but currently it's just preventing humans from accessing. And I've always been a very modest user.

Help please

Please do send me a private message with more details.

 

[Elosha]

Solved! Reason: Accidentally getting on the blocklist, was fixed immediately. Thanks!

 

[misterg33]

@fogWraith -- Can you check to see if the garden is reachable when iCloud private relay is on?

 

[fogWraith]

@fogWraith -- Can you check to see if the garden is reachable when iCloud private relay is on?

I wouldn't know, I don't use it nor do I have any device using it outside of the network to test it properly - though I would suspect that it will be hit & miss depending on which relay you end up using.

 

[JDW]

Use of VPNs and Relays impacts other popular Mac sites like Macintouch too. Do a keyword search for "iCloud Private Relay" at the following URL:

https://www.macintouch.com/macintouch-faq/

I am not saying anything negative against VPNs and Relays. I honestly think they are important. I am just pointing out that Macintosh Garden is not totally unique in the way it behaves with some VPNs or Relays.

 

[Elosha]

Regarding my case, the VPN wasn't anything public, but just the work VPN, as in "a different private IP"

 

[JDW]

Well, darn. I'm not using any VPN and I got the 403 today while doing nothing other than entering PACMAN in the search field and initiating the search.

Clicking on the "fix this problem yourself" link yields this error screen...

I then switched to Firefox to try it there, but upon trying to open the domain, it refused saying this...

I then reloaded in Firefox and the Garden magically appeared. I then did the PACMAN search and it worked...

Switched back to Safari and tried it again, and it worked too.

Not sure what to say, but it's not the first time this has happened to me over the last month, so I thought it best to report it.

This occurred at 10:55pm on Sept. 14th, Japan time.

 

[fogWraith]

Well, darn. I'm not using any VPN and I got the 403 today while doing nothing other than entering PACMAN in the search field and initiating the search.

View attachment 23161

Clicking on the "fix this problem yourself" link yields this error screen...

View attachment 23162

I then switched to Firefox to try it there, but upon trying to open the domain, it refused saying this...

View attachment 23163

I then reloaded in Firefox and the Garden magically appeared. I then did the PACMAN search and it worked...

View attachment 23164

Switched back to Safari and tried it again, and it worked too.

Not sure what to say, but it's not the first time this has happened to me over the last month, so I thought it best to report it.

This occurred at 10:55pm on Sept. 14th, Japan time.

There may or may not be minor hiccups with the module (old backend, stagnated code vs. browsers continue to develop) that produces that particular 403 message, the link to "solve it yourself" hasn't worked in years I believe. I might be disabling the entire module and look at implementing another solution, though that's if I have enough time to look into that any closer anytime soon.

 

[scj312]

I found that clearing all of my cache, cookies, etc for macintoshgarden.org caused the 403 error to go away for me.