Seiko 7A38 - by the numbers

Yet another truly unbelievable example of gross incompetence on the part of our Webs host. In case anybody else besides myself has attempted to create a new post, over the last couple of days, I'll warn you now that when you've finished composing, and hit the 'Submit' button, instead of the usual mildly annoying Captcha picture challenge, you're more likely to be met with this screen:

The small print reads: Cloudflare Ray ID followed by a random generated number.

Trust me, it isn't me with my admin hat on who has blocked (or banned) you. 

It's Webs Death Ray !! 

What I've found is that if your new post is just plain text*, then it's likely (but not always) to be accepted and automatically redirected to the thread. However, any post including a URL link or a photo is likely to be rejected. Which seeing as the bulk of my posts usually contain both, is more than a minor inconvenience !

I've even tried posting just the text (alone) first - then going back in to edit the post (within the 10 minute editing window) and adding URL's and photos afterwards. As soon as I hit 'Submit' for the second time, I find myself blocked again ! FFS !!

In case you're wondering how I've managed to complete these couple of posts (and the few others I've made over the last couple of days), it's not because of my Admin level ID. Even that is affected. I've actually been making them via the website's Control Panel Dashboard - which believe me is a pain in the A$$ !

*See example below.

This is a test post - text only, without URL's or images, made from the live forum:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

There wasn't a great deal of point in my trying to contact Webs over the weekend, as their engineers only work Monday to Friday. But I've just finished an online chat with a Webs helpdesk representative:

1:21:50 PM

Nickesha:

Unfortunately, I have to escalate this issue to our senior engineers for them to investigate and troubleshoot.

1:21:59 PM

Nickesha:

I will tag your email to the ticket I am escalating, therefore, you will be notified with an update as soon as one becomes available.

(Call Reference ID: 1685387 assigned.)

I've not received any notification from Webs Technical Support (or for that matter, any other communication in the last week), but it appears they may have been working on the problem. This morning I've been able to make a couple of short posts, both of which included a URL and a single embedded image - and both actually worked first time !

The difference now, is that I'm still seeing the basic Cloudflare Captcha challenge (the I'm not a robot checkbox), but at the time of writing, it's not followed by the usual annoying picture challenge.

Update: I've just made a longer post, including a URL, with multiple embedded images, which after composing, I edited 'a few' times, for good measure. After the second edit, I started seeing the usual annoying Captcha picture challenges again.

So it looks like the status quo has mostly been restored.  I say 'mostly', because this morning, this screen is popping up with annoying regularity (during editing).