Domain forwarding - extra step

[gilbouk]

I’m in the middle of rebranding and have purchased a new domain. I have set it up so that visitors to my new domain are forwarded onto my website at the old domain.

Unusually I have noticed that for those visiting the new domain from a Vodafone connection are being asked to complete a captcha to prove they are human which is not ideal. Any ideas how to overcome this to avoid that necessity?

 

[KIPAX]

I have set it up so that visitors to my new domain are forwarded onto my website at the old domain.

How have you set it up.. the correct way is to change the nameservers which i am guessing you havent done as you wouldnt have nay problems ..

 

[Box Brownie]

Never seen anything like that before.

My limited experience with domain name forwarding, which I set up via the 'user interface' of the company I use to "park" my domains, is that it can take 24 to 48 hours to propagate. AFAIK the time will vary depending on the TLD of the domain and the TLD of the one you are forwarding to e.g .co.uk to another .co.uk or from a .co.uk to a .com ?

 

[KIPAX]

Never seen anything like that before.

My limited experience with domain name forwarding, which I set up via the 'user interface' of the company I use to "park" my domains, is that it can take 24 to 48 hours to propagate. AFAIK the time will vary depending on the TLD of the domain and the TLD of the one you are forwarding to e.g .co.uk to another .co.uk or from a .co.uk to a .com ?

Propogating is when service providors update so shouldnt be effected by the TLD

Whats the domain thats being pointed ?

 

[Box Brownie]

Propogating is when service providors update so shouldnt be effected by the TLD

Whats the domain thats being pointed ?

Appears to be his "lovephotos.net" domain redirecting to his "lovemorephotography.co.uk" though only looked using the PC, so don't see the odd problem he mentions.

 

[gilbouk]

Propogating is when service providors update so shouldnt be effected by the TLD

Whats the domain thats being pointed ?

I'm using godaddy and it prompted me how I wanted to use the new domain. I clicked on the option which said forward to existing website and entered my existing website.

The new domain is lovephotos.net and my old domain which I plan to keep active due to clients bookmarks and business cards which have already been given out is lovemorephotography.co.uk. Just wasn't sure why Vodafone was the only ISP that appears to have the problem with this extra step. Will look at my name server settings tonight

 

[Box Brownie]

FWIW

Viewing using Chrome via 3 and GiffGaff are aok.

 

[J Veitch]

Cloudflare (the content delivery network being used to deliver the site) is blocking the request and throwing a captcha to make sure the request is from a real person. I'd guess that the Vodaphone source IPs (maybe they are using a proxy - so combining many users requests behind a small number of IPs) is being seen by Cloudflare making many unusual requests, or is an "odd" UserAgent (the "identity string" of the web browser). Or the IP address has been blocked / listed as a bad address. Mobile networks often suffer this as IPs are much less static than typical home users.

 

[gilbouk]

Cloudflare (the content delivery network being used to deliver the site) is blocking the request and throwing a captcha to make sure the request is from a real person. I'd guess that the Vodaphone source IPs (maybe they are using a proxy - so combining many users requests behind a small number of IPs) is being seen by Cloudflare making many unusual requests, or is an "odd" UserAgent (the "identity string" of the web browser). Or the IP address has been blocked / listed as a bad address. Mobile networks often suffer this as IPs are much less static than typical home users.

Do you think there's a fix I could use to overcome this issue?

 

[J Veitch]

If you had a direct cloudflare account you can actually log in and check the ray id from the captcha screen and see if Cloudflare offers a config change to stop this, or you could also try checking if the public IP on Vodaphone is on a bad reputation list somewhere (try a "whatismyip" to get your public IP - like http://whatismyip.akamai.com ) and then searching it. You could try contacting cloudflare I suppose, although without a support contract I'm not sure where that will get you. The other option is to move from Cloudflare - disclaimer I work for a different CDN provider

Finally, it is actually possible that the issue may pass as they see more traffic and mark it as "usual" rather than anomaly.

 

[J Veitch]

actually - here is a link to some more info cloudflare

 

[gilbouk]

If you had a direct cloudflare account you can actually log in and check the ray id from the captcha screen and see if Cloudflare offers a config change to stop this, or you could also try checking if the public IP on Vodaphone is on a bad reputation list somewhere (try a "whatismyip" to get your public IP - like http://whatismyip.akamai.com ) and then searching it. You could try contacting cloudflare I suppose, although without a support contract I'm not sure where that will get you. The other option is to move from Cloudflare - disclaimer I work for a different CDN provider

Finally, it is actually possible that the issue may pass as they see more traffic and mark it as "usual" rather than anomaly.

Thanks very much for this advice as well as the link!! Will be sure to follow what you suggest. When you say CDN provider, and changing from Cloudflare, how do you do that? I'm current with Go Daddy - is that the CDN provider?

 

[gilbouk]

I think it's fixed!! I followed your advice @J Veitch and created a free account with cloudflare. It asked me for my domain, and after than asked me to change my nameservers to cloudflare which I did, and now it's not throwing up that extra CAPTCHA page which I saw before when accessing it from my Vodafone mobile. Hopefully I haven't broken access elsewhere.