Why is vodafone blocking my website?

[jackhood9]

Hi,

My website https://ce-tech.info/

Is being blocked by vodafone, stating that it's an 18+ website (it's not 18+ at all!)

It works on wifi and O2 networks, but vodafone is giving an issue.

I have https enabled and SSL certificates (can be checked on 

Please can this be fixed 

[DanPeakBody]

Thanks @Gemma that matches with the feedback we recieved yesterday. Thanks for resolving this rapidly.

[Gemma]

You're welcome @DanPeakBody - Thanks for the update. 

[MJ19]

Hello @Gemma Would it be possible to have our website reclassified, please? www.beautybay.com

It appears we are still being blocked and here are the steps to reproduce the issue. 

We have narrowed down the issue and it appears that the issue relates to Vodafone users on a business tariff including any sub-accounts within their plan. If they have parental controls on it blocks our site, however, we do not have adult content on our site and our competitors (Look Fantastic, Cult Beauty) are not being blocked. 

Removing the parental controls allows us to access the site after a few hours. If we turn the controls back on, it still allows us on the site even though the block should reapply (falsely) . It appears there are two issues. 1. We are being blocked/classified incorrectly and 2. There is a bug in the system. I'm less concerned about the bug and would like to request reclassification asap. My Colleague @R-K reported this on here months ago and my legal colleague @VJ2  escalated this on here again the other day. We've also contacted contentclassification@vodafone.com multiple times and had no response.

Can someone investigate this urgently?

Many thanks

[DanPeakBody]

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If we turn the controls back on, it still allows us on the site even though the block should reapply (falsely

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Just an FYI, this could be DNS caching on the devices, and blocking may return in time..?

You could try checking your CDN being overzealous on blocking 'bots', it might be blocking the automated classification bots?

[MJ19]

Thanks @DanPeakBody  we're able to reproduce this on Vodafone devices under the account setup described above so we're very confident the issue is on their network side as we've looking into ours multiple times and reproduced it. Thanks for the suggestions!

[DanPeakBody]

I agree it's not on your side. Nor was ours. Vodafone inflict this to unknown numbers of businesses without their knowledge.

However, for us, when we switched cloudflare to be more flexible on bots it coincided with our 'reclassification', so I suspect it was allot.com's automated checks (I believe allot.com power their service). Like you I found it a nightmare to contact vodafone and this forum is not only the best, but the only avenue that I found. I'm not convinced there's actual humans in this process, it's just automated checks being re-ran after we all guess at what could be the magic switch it's looking for. Interestingly Allot.com have a phone number on their website, but any promised call backs from the receptionist never materialised for me.

I really do appreciate the moderators and users for doing what they can and pointing out the likely issues - some of the users are generously doing what should be paid (by vodafone) consulting for free on here, but I share(d) your frustrating.  I know you're not on cloudflare like us, but I wondered your amazon hosting/cdn had similar.

Vodafone should publish the ips somewhere to whitelist for classification, I'm not aware if they do, I couldn't find any.

[Gemma]

Hi @MJ19  - this is strange with it only being Business users. Have you found that Consumer Vodafone users can access it with no issues? I can see when this was raised to us in September, we could access the site with no issues. With it being ongoing, I've raised it to be reviewed by our Support team and one of us will come back to you here when there's an update. This is logged under reference INC000005450722. 

[MJ19]

Hi Gemma,

Thank you for picking this up. Yes, consumers also have the issue if they are on a family plan. We’ve found that if you have parental controls on and try to access via 4G on a cognito/private browser you can reproduce the issue as the website can cache if you’ve visited before. Thank you, I’ll await the support teams response.

[Beth]

Hi @Ingoe84! I've re-run Virus Total and there are no more flags on the site so I've raised this under INC000005346235. As soon as we receive an update, we'll update the thread here 🙂

[Ingoe84]

Thank you