Ask HN: Is it possible to be profiled as a bot?

by jojojaf on 10/29/2023, 12:46:16 PM with 10 comments
Sometimes I wonder if I'm being profiled as a bot. Is this possible? If so, where would such a profile exist?

Here is the evidence I have;

* PayPal kicked me out recently and they won't give a reason despite me trying pretty hard to get one. * Wikipedia has my IP blacklisted for editing. No idea why. * It took a long time talking to customer services last year to convince Discord that I wasn't a bot when I tried to sign up * I have two 2-3 year old Gmail accounts, both of which always have empty spam folders. (I checked, it's not a settings thing. There are a couple of other people online who also have this problem and can't solve it)

Am I just imagining that these things could be related somehow?

  • by LinuxBender on 10/29/2023, 12:48:48 PM

    I am just guessing but what you are describing sounds like you had the unfortunate luck of getting a DHCP or CG-NAT address that was being used by an aggressive and highly abusive bot. It may be worth looking into if you can release that IP and get a new one while also clearing out all forms of caches on all devices.