How Can a Website Block Me?
By Stephen Lilley
User ID
The first (and easiest) way that a user can be blocked by a website is to simply block the user name and password from being accepted. This only works if you have to sign into some kind of account to use the site and its services, with examples being Gmail or Yahoo.com. Once a user name has been noticed by site officials to be breaking the Terms of Service (the rules in which a user agrees to follow when signing up for a web site), the user name can simply be denied entry to the site. When the user attempts to log in from that point forward, he will be unable to and will have been effectively blocked from accessing the web page. This can be temporary for a predetermined period of time or permanent. Many online message board websites will require users to sign up for an account and block them if they become harmful to their community.
IP Address
The second way a website can block you from accessing it is to block your IP address. IP is short for "internet protocol" address and is a unique multidigit number assigned to you automatically by your operating system once you connect to some kind of network. Every network has a different IP address, which makes people easily identifiable to network administrators. Once a website administrator notices that a specific user attached to a specific IP address is breaking the site's Terms of Service, he can block that IP from being able to access the site. This means that nobody will ever be able to access the site again from that particular computer network. If a person's IP address is blocked from a site while using a public computer in a setting like a library, nobody who uses that location for internet access will be able to connect to that site regardless of whether she was involved with the blocking or not.
Proxy Sites
Despite the seemingly sure-fire ways a website can block a person from accessing it, there are a number of things you can do to get around it. The easiest is to access a proxy site. A proxy site is a website that acts as a middle man between you and another website. In layman's terms, if your IP address has been banned from a website, you can type the URL of the site into a proxy site, which will then allow you to connect. This is because the proxy site has its own unique IP address that hasn't been blocked by the website in question.
References
Writer Bio
Stephen Lilley is a freelance writer who hopes to one day make a career writing for film and television. His articles have appeared on a variety of websites. Lilley holds a Bachelor of Arts in film and video production from the University of Toledo in Ohio.