Wyrd of Parker J. Torrence

Well around 5pm on April 19th I called the owner of Wolfhome to attempt to clear up the banning mess. He was surprisingly pleasant considering I was calling him at his home.

(the following is from my phone call and an email exchange between the owner and my wife)

At the bottom of the mess, one of my youngest daughter’s friends got banned back on the 8th of April. As Wolfhome uses a method of IP address bans. It banned everyone using our ISP. My daughter submitted a problem ticket asking why she had been banned (she in fact had not yet been banned, her friend who uses the same ISP that we do, had been but the IP address ban effected us too). A few days latter she submitted 3 more problem tickets asking the same question. That is when she did get banned. I have no idea as to how many other problem tickets Wolfhome got from other users of our ISP, but it seems it was over a dozen.

For all practical purposes the ban has been lifted from the 22+ users it had affected (the 22 usernames list I had received via my middle daughter’s boyfriend, was in fact not a complete list of all effected by the ban).

My closing thoughts on this matter: In a day and age with Internet cafes, wifi connected colleges and Proxy Servers, why would someone still be using IP address bans? A MAC address ban would take it to the level of the computer being used regardless of the IP address being accessed by that computer. It seems more logical, and if it had been being used, this whole mess from my point of view would of never taken place in the first place.

Up until a few days ago I had never heard of Wolfhome. So what is Woldhome? It seems it is a flash based comic style chat room(s).

Like many families, in my house hold we have more people then computers, so we use the time share system. The children are on the computers, or the adults are on the computers. So I had noticed that my children were visiting a new website where animated wolves talked to each other. They seemed to be having fun, and they know the rules about what they can and can not say in chat rooms, and my 18 year old daughter was in the rooms with them most of the time so I did not give it much thought.

Tuesday night my son asked to get on the computer, a few minutes latter I heard him yelling at his sister (not the 18 year old) about something. So it was Dad time … after I got him calmed down I learned that he was Banned from Wolfhome. Well to be more exact “his sister had got banned” and because of that he was also banned.

My wife who had heard of Wolfhome before, went and joined only to find that before ever entering a chat room and having the chance to offend anyone, she was also banned!

In all it seems that there are 22 usernames banned, only of which 8 can be traced back to my household. Only 2 of those usernames belong to my youngest daughter.

While I have no desire to go into why my youngest daughter got banned in the first place, I find it incomprehensible that someone at Wolfhome deemed it prudent to “perm ban” everyone in our small Wyoming town that uses the same ISP.

Being a small town using a local ISP, our ISP tech finds it in his best interest to run most of his subscribers to the Internet using the same IP address. I have lived other places where every time you log in you get a different IP address. I’m not a tech, I’m sure that there are good and bad points to both systems. That Wolfhome chose to ban the IP address and in effect 22 of their users I would think as one of the bad points. It also does not speak well of the Admin at Wolfhome for the short sightedness.