I-Follow & VPN Blocked

I actually missed this thread despite being tagged. They don't know you are actually using a VPN but what they do know is the IP your traffic is coming from and over time it's pretty easy to build up a list of known VPN IPs and then just block them. I could right now write a pretty simple script that collects all your IP's, run a reverse check on them to find the originating location of that IP and flag anything that looks like it's coming from a VPN (as there are certain things which can give it away especially when enough data is collected) and then redirects anyone using a VPN to a different landing screen or even just blocks you at the server level. And actually, I don't even need to do that, there are IP lists for all sorts of things that you can pay to query that can allow you to manage or block certain traffic, people mostly use it to block specific countries, for example, its common to block China at server level due to the amount of DDoS and general hacking attempts that come from out of there, I've got most of china's IP's blocked at the server level for this site for example.

VPN services though are often adding new IP's to their pools and as such you might get blocked once but if you reconnect and end up at a different node, even if you are connecting to the same location you might get lucky and it's one that hasn't been identified but at some point that one will also get blocked.

What people really need for accessing things like iFollow is to deploy individual VPN's so you have your own unique IP address which makes it less likely to raise a red flag of having multiple people accessing from a single IP but that's beyond most peoples abilities (its how I do it). Maybe its something I should set up for next season although I'm not sure at the price I would need to charge to cover my costs and also to make it worth my time managing it that it would be a price most would be willing to charge as for such a bespoke system it would have to be more than iFollow charge

It will largely be more the TV companies protecting the value of the deals they sign that is actually where the pressure comes from. The only way the EFL and the clubs would really care without outside pressure from people buying the rights is if the blackout went away and people were using VPN's to pay much less going through say India than they would for the UK side as that's them losing money

And no its probably won't just be the big VPN's because they are unlikely to manage these blocklists on their own. They will be buying access to blocklists, most likely ones where its community-driven, like the spam-block lists we use on this site. Basically, we don't store a local IP blacklist in the server software like you can do, managing it is just way too much hassle. When you signup (and for certain user groups when you post) we query a spam-blacklist for your IP, if you are on it you get blocked. If on this site or any other site using the blacklist someone gets through if the mod uses the correct spam cleaning option when they ban a spammer that IP gets sent to the blacklist so all other sites will now know to block the spammer. And it will most likely be the same with whatever blacklist provider the EFL use, if they (or anyone else) blocks someone for VPN use that IP gets added to the list and gets blocked across all sites using the blacklist. So it will catch ip's from all sorts of sizes of VPN provider

 

I hope so too as I feel the likes of Sparks is missing the point. It's not the hardcore away fans that are the problem, just look at PL games that are on TV, these committed groups of fans will travel hundreds of miles to go even when its on TV. It's the more casual fans who now decide do they pay £20 EACH to attend a match in person when it could be tipping it down and cold and comes with other costs or pay £10 and get as many people around as you can fit in the room to watch in the warmth.

The problem is that I feel like there are enough clubs like City who have a large enough fanbase that it would actually benefit them financially to do it, especially with the way the away fan split is done that it will get through the vote. And it removes the scarcity and distance factor. You don't have a 'sell out' with a streaming game whereas a stadium has a finite number of people that it can hold. And you don't have to travel to get there. So while you might not be able to get a ticket or its too far away so you might go to a non-league game for your dose of football clubs now lose that. The only way it might work is if a massive amount of the money was going into a general pot, distributed not just to the EFL clubs but through the pyramid so the bigger clubs just don't starve the rest of the EFL and worse of all non-league

 

The UK is too small to make local blackouts like in the US work, especially when it comes to the internet. For example often the location your public IP address resolves to is actually the closest data hub for your ISP, mine right now is showing as Manchester but I'm just over an hour by car away from Manchester. And there are times when even on a big ISP you can be showing up as in London.

And it's the potential impact on other teams. If you have moved away so can't get to games there are other matches locally you can attend and while not all who would buy an ifollow pass do a number of people do attend a local match if they can't get to their main team