Startpage.com blocking

[fretless]

Maybe someone here can help me figure this out. A few days ago, I got blocked by Startpage.com. When I tried to access the page, it informed me that my connection has been suspended due to "high volume traffic associated with bots and scrapers".

Not sure what brought this about, but I responded to them and explained I was not a "bot" and the following day my connection was working again. At least, it's working in any browser except Pale Moon. Pale Moon is my regular browser, and I have used Startpage with it for several years. But now I still get the blocked message in Pale Mon only, while the page comes up fine in Vivaldi, Edge and Mozilla.

So far nothing I've done has had any affect. I've cleared the cache (both of them), tried changing the User Agent mode setting, and turned off the router for several minutes to force the public IP to be re-assigned. Did an "ipconfig/flushdns". Restarted numerous times. It's been 3 days now and I'm no closer to understanding what the problem is.

Can anyone help me understand how it knows which browser is in use, or some clue how to resolve this? Any ideas or suggestions are very much appreciated.

Using Pale Moon 33.4.0.1, 64-bit under Windows 10 Pro 22H2

[Moonchild]

I don't see an issue with startpage.com on my end.
Have you tried getting support from startpage.com? We can't really do anything about them blocking you on their end.

[fretless]

Thanks for your reply. I did message their support, as I had mentioned, and it appears they have lifted the block. The page was blocked for me in all browsers initially, but after contacting them all other browsers started working again. Just not Pale Moon. And in case I'm not being clear, Startpage has always worked for me in Pale Moon until now.

What I don't understand at all is how it can be restored in other browsers but not this one. And I don't mean to imply this is some flaw in Pale Moon at all. I just don't understand what is causing it. It's not some kind of deal-breaker either, I have no intention of switching browsers. There are plenty of search page alternatives to use. It just bugs me that I can't figure it out..

[Moonchild]

how it can be restored in other browsers but not this one

It depends entirely on how their "anti-bot" system works. It's possible for example that they have a 'scoring" system and while your IP block was lifted, it may still be scored high, and e.g. combined with Pale Moon's user-agent, triggering their block. Once again nothing we can do anything about here. You can try adding a site-specific user-agent override for startpage.com to work around it, e.g. by sending them a known-working browser UA like an exact Firefox user-agent.

[Night Wing]

"Startpage" is my Home page. I have no problem accessing it via my Home button when using linux Pale Moon on all three of the linux distros I use which are Mint, MX Linux and Debian..