Startpage search engine blocking Seamonkey?

[vtmozilla]

I don't know how general a problem this is, but StartPage is now blocking Seamonkey installs in my household. It is NOT blocking Firefox installs on the same computers. We do not use a proxy, screen scraping software, Tor browser, VPN, and are not on a company network.

Is anyone else seeing this?

The blocking message is:

We apologize for the inconvenience: to prevent possible abuse of the Startpage.com service, your Internet connection has been prevented from accessing it at this time.

This happens when a large number of search requests are received from one's Internet connection in a short amount of time -- for example, if you are using "screen-scraping" software, or if you are sharing a connection with many people, perhaps through a proxy service.

Otherwise, if you have received this message in error, please help us in investigation by providing following information:

- Are you using TOR or other anonymous proxies?
- Do you have special browser configuration or extensions?
- Are you using VPN?
- Are you using a company network?

We will seek to refine and correct this whenever possible. Thank you for your patience.

[frg]

Well they can't block SeaMonkey installs but seems they had a problem earlier and searching via them didn't work. Currently seems to be good. Makes no sense from them to block SeaMonkey because we have a contract with them but you never know

Will inquire if it comes up again. I actually use them as my primary search right now.

FRG

[vtmozilla]

Interesting. Well I normally run Linux, but I can also boot this laptop into Windows. So I did, and tried Seamonkey on Win7. It put up the same block message.

So here's the tally:

All instances of Seamonkey in this household are blocked from accessing StarPage. That covers 3 computers and 3 operating systems tested (Win, and two linuxes).

All instances of Firefox in the same household on the same computers, with all 3 operating systems can access Startpage with no problem. Therefore the IP is not blocked, just the Seamonkey browsers.

Because the problem has persisted even after I have wiped Seamonkey's cookies, cache and offline website data, I'm guessing Startpage may be blocking erroneously based simply on the Seamonkey user-agent.

[Rob_S]

Just to confirm, startpage search is working for me using seamonkey -

[Wish You Were Here]

Never heard of them.

Tried it and got a couple of results. No nastygrams.

[vtmozilla]

Now an hour later I can access Startpage again from Seamonkey. No Idea why the whole issue occurred. I did write to Startpage about the problem. Maybe they released the block.

[Wish You Were Here]

What type of web connection are you on? Something that assigns IPs dynamically? I've been blocked out of sites in the past because of something somebody else did months earlier. I just happened to get an IP that the site had blocked. I was able to cycle the modem an get a new IP that wasn't blocked.

[therube]

I didn't look (at this here or that there), but this Pale Moon thread likely has some related details, Fixed -> Startpage Search appears to be blocking all Moonchild browsers.

[davidb_sk]

I don't know if this matters or not now, but I've been using Startpage for a while now with SeaMonkey without any problems. I even have Startpage installed as a Search Engine option and it works just fine... no error messages.

[ElTxolo]

I don't know how general a problem this is, but StartPage is now blocking Seamonkey installs in my household.
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  Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 SeaMonkey/2.49.4

  But what do you expect? .... Using an insecure and outdated, version of SeaMonkey, that is almost three years old (SeaMonkey 2.49.4 - July 27, 2018').
  
  BTW, personally I have absolutely NO problem, using Startpage:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

[Wish You Were Here]

Some bit got changed from 2.49.4 to 2.49.5. I don't know what, but most of the sites that I had trouble with in .4 work just fine with .5

2.5x.x messed up a lot of stuff for me again ... stuff that I depend on heavily.