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I thought I’d go onto WOS and download a few games to play on the ZX. Not many, just a handful of games “from my past”. You know, stuff like Valhalla, Feud, things like that. Now like so many people I don’t recall all games I used to like, but I’m reminded of them when I look through a list. So, I go to the archive pages. Now there are 27 pages linked from here, one page for numbers, and one page for each letter of the alphabet. This makes sense. So to save myself some time I do the old “open each link in a new tab” function of Firefox (or whatever extension I’ve installed). I’m happily looking through the A-to-Z pages when one of them shows the following warning: “425: Mirroring Denied!”

Eh? I was just browsing a few (ok, 27) pages on WOS to see which games I wanted to download. I’m sure I’ve not reached my download quota just yet. Then it hit – “open in tabs” would have tried to load each page at the same time. The server would see this as an attempt to mirror the site and added me to the “banned” list. That’s crap.

What’s crapper is that, because I’m “banned” I can’t actually get onto the site to see if my assumption about why is correct, or when the ban will end. Or even if the ban will end without me sending pleading letters to Martijn.

While I understand that with a site like WOS some kind of mirror-protection is actually a “Good Idea”, it can obviously fail in some instances. This wouldn’t be so bad but for the fact that once banned you can’t find out the details of the banning. Perhaps it would be a good idea to add to the “mirroring denied” page some text to explain what you can do about it, or a link to an off-server copy of the “Why I’m Banned” page, rather than just leave the poor user in the lurch. It’s just a thought.