Welcome to the Websites of
Philip Goddard

hub website: www.philipgoddard.com

>> 'Error 403' (Forbidden Access) page <<


My apologies for this frustration for you! — Let's now work out how to get you access…

Although there could be other causes of this, it could be that your IP address is banned on all my sites because of my measures to thwart the actions of troublesome 'bots' (spambots, referrer spammers, site hackers, content scrapers and so on) visiting my sites. In particular, some whole countries are blocked from my sites due to persistent bad traffic and little or no genuine human traffic coming from them.

Getting caught by one of my bot traps is another possibility — but if that has happened you'd know about it because you'd have reached a page telling you that you'd fallen into the bot trap.

That would generally happen if you were filling in a form on one of my sites, with auto-form-filling enabled in your browser, or you were using a mass-downloading agent to download a whole site. For good reasons, including site security, I seek to block the use of mass-downloading agents.

A new (2020) possible cause for getting bot-trapped is if you use the Wayback Machine browser extension. Sorry about that, but something calling itself WayBack Machine Extension (in the User Agent string) has started effectively attacking my sites with very large numbers of spurious page requests — which can be hundreds in quick succession, of 'HEAD' requests for one particular page. The only sensible thing I could do about that was to direct all requests with 'Wayback Machine Extension' in their User Agent string to the bot trap. In any case, it doesn't make sense to go to the Wayback Machine to get pages from any of my sites, because they will inevitably be out of date — at least, until I've died and my sites have disappeared.

Please note also that if the 'referrer' string in the header information given by your browser on each page / file request is absent or falsified, that could also result in 'Forbidden Access' responses without your actually being banned. So, please ensure that neither your browser nor any security software is configured to falsify or strip out your HTTP_REFERER string.

There is NO genuine security risk nor significant privacy issue, at least for non-criminals, in allowing one's browser to give correct referrer information when accessing a page or file. This cause of a 'forbidden access' response would happen particularly if you are attempting to access an item such as a sound file or a zipped document, and your browser isn't reporting correctly what site you are clicking through from. The solution to that is in your own hands.

Please note that the passphrase MickeyMousetheMighty no longer works.

I'd given that passphrase to a small number of people to add to their browser User-Agent string. That worked well in letting particular people through without my having to take action to unblock them individually.

I'm sorry to say, however, that I eventually found that this was the cause of my website statistics reporting significant numbers of corrupt logfile lines, because the User-Agent Switcher browser extension, used for putting that passphrase into the UA string, does a grand job of corrupting it, adding-in an amazing succession of completely irrelevant characters as well as the added passphrase. That in turn causes complications for me in keeping tabs on the traffic for each of my sites — which is necessary for me to be able continually to improve the sites and their online visibility.

I've now found a better and apparently well-behaved user-agent switching / spoofing add-on to use instead, with a new passphrase.

Please use my 'Unblock-Me' page to get your instructions for adding that new passphrase to your default user-agent string.


Need to be unbanned / whitelisted?

As you are reading this you are presumably not one of those disgusting bots at all but an actual and presumably very nice bona fide visitor now prevented from accessing one or more pages, files, or sites of mine. Sorry about that!

No cause for alarm and despondency, however! Please let me know which page(s), file(s) or site(s) of mine you are locked out of; I'd then be able to unban you and indeed whitelist you if appropriate — though if the issue is that your browser isn't giving the correct referring site information, that would be something that you yourself need to rectify (applies particularly to blocked non-page files such as sound files, images or zip files).

So, if you are blocked from a site of mine please use the form on my 'Unblock Me' contact page, which will automatically report to me your IP address, which latter I'd need in order to unban you. Please be sure to tell me clearly and with all relevant detail what you were doing at the time you found you were blocked. It isn't fair upon me to just say 'Please unblock me' and leave me to try to work out what the eff you were actually doing to cause you a 'Forbidden Access' response! Please do your best to help me to help you, otherwise indeed I may ignore your request!

Kind regards,
Philip Goddard.