ShopTech EM2
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I am not arguing that it is wrong or bad. I am disagreeing that it means shutdown or out of business, which is only your opinion of that screen. not mine. not everyone else's.
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Notice that they didn't give me any means of contacting the company. If this was a functioning business that had closed its doors to some group intentionally you would expect them to provide alternative contact information like how to reach them through email or phone. Instead the error message assumes that I have access to internal IT.
If I was a business owner that used their software, was traveling and saw this everywhere I tried to access from, I would have little reason to assume anything but that they had gone out of business. This isn't a "down" message, not an intentional error.
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@WingCreative said:
WordFence is a WordPress security plugin that touts country IP blocking as a feature. I'm betting some web developer was like "Let's just whitelist the countries we're marketing to, there's no way anyone in any other countries would ever have a legitimate reason to visit!"
Yeah, I work with WP and recognized that. Very cheesy stuff to be exposing to the outside world. But to someone who doesn't run WP, it would just look like any other "exposed our internal systems to the outside world" message.
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I think everything below the "Reason" text is intended for hapless website administrators that accidentally locked themselves out of their own websites. It is pretty silly of them to have so much instruction for just that particular scenario... How often does that even happen?
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for sure atleast once
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@JaredBusch said:
I am not arguing that it is wrong or bad. I am disagreeing that it means shutdown or out of business, which is only your opinion of that screen. not mine. not everyone else's.
I didn't say that it means that. Only that customers could see it that way since that's what it looks like to non-technical people.
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@WingCreative said:
I think everything below the "Reason" text is intended for hapless website administrators that accidentally locked themselves out of their own websites. It is pretty silly of them to have so much instruction for just that particular scenario... How often does that even happen?
I'm sure. But again, this all only makes sense to us as IT people. To their customers, it looks like they have lost their minds.
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Just checked their Twitter feed. After being rather active and posting constantly ... it went totally silent on 9 Feb 2014. Twitter, too, makes it look like they have shut their doors. Between leaving their site like this, not responding to Twitter messages and their Twitter feed looking like they gave up a year and a half ago - it actually builds a case more and more that they might actually be out of business. Seems strange that if they were up and running that they would not have looked into why they were blocking customers and sending out that bizarre message to them. Sure it might have happened recently, but no way to tell.
Do they have any interface to the world that suggests that they are up and running or just that their website is still up?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@DustinB3403 said:
Their just blocking Nicaragua, loaded fine from the US.
Seems odd that they would choose that to be their face to the world. Looks like they went out of business. Definitely doesn't look like they know what they are doing.
I would say that is par for the course judging from my experience with them.
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@coliver said:
I would say that is par for the course judging from my experience with them.
That they went out of business or are avoiding their customers?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
I would say that is par for the course judging from my experience with them.
That they went out of business or are avoiding their customers?
That they don't know what they are doing. To be fair their support is usually prompt but not the most effective.
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Found a different Twitter feed that isn't directly connected to their main company identity but seems to be for a product line. It has more recent Twitter activity, so trying them.
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@coliver said:
That they don't know what they are doing. To be fair their support is usually prompt but not the most effective.
How prompt can they be if there is no way to contact them?
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Found them on Facebook, trying them there.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
That they don't know what they are doing. To be fair their support is usually prompt but not the most effective.
How prompt can they be if there is no way to contact them?
I guess prompt when you are in the US.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@WingCreative said:
I think everything below the "Reason" text is intended for hapless website administrators that accidentally locked themselves out of their own websites. It is pretty silly of them to have so much instruction for just that particular scenario... How often does that even happen?
I'm sure. But again, this all only makes sense to us as IT people. To their customers, it looks like they have lost their minds.
Yeah, seeing what the Geo IP blocking looks like on this end makes me even happier to have moved away from WordFence for security... Their plugin was effective but left a lot to be desired in terms of polish/usability IMO. This shows that the lack of polish extends to the visitor-facing parts of the plugin as well.
And they're not even honest with the error message - if the Geo IP banning is active then access has been indefinitely denied, not "temporarily limited"!
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@WingCreative said:
And they're not even honest with the error message - if the Geo IP banning is active then access has been indefinitely denied, not "temporarily limited"!
Yes, given that I was blocked the first time I've ever attempted that site that was part of the "looks like they shut down" part. Trying to imply that I did something to trigger this when obviously, I had not, feeds into the "doesn't look legit" part of it.
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I'll keep people informed if they turn out to be still in business. I assume that they are and that their apparently "unmanaged" web presence is a fluke and the dead Twitter feed is a coincidence. So far no responses on either Twitter feed, Facebook or here. They have been told directly about this thread, so expect a human from ShopTech to be posting in here if they are, indeed, still up and running.
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Well,... they do (did) plan to be around a while longer:
Domain Name: SHOPTECH.COM Registry Domain ID: 72657728_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.networksolutions.com Registrar URL: http://networksolutions.com Updated Date: 2015-01-29T00:17:40Z Creation Date: 2006-07-18T06:26:25Z Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2021-06-14T04:00:00Z -
I am fairly certain I spoke to someone in support in the last two weeks.
And not that it is the proper way to manage things,.. but some years ago when my server was being attacked, I used the Firewall (Untangle) to block whole Octects of IPs from countries... like China
