botcheckme

“Sorry, you have been blocked”

A captcha is a question. A block page is an answer. When a site shows you an access-denied page with a reference number, your request scored past the point where the site still offers a way through, so the fix is to change what it scores before you try again.

Sites that use a bot check set two lines, not one. Below the first, the request goes through. Between the first and the second, the visitor gets a challenge: a box, a puzzle, a wait. Past the second, the request is refused outright, and the page shows a block notice with a reference number, often called a Ray ID or an incident ID.

The reference number is for the site's owner, not for you. It lets them look up exactly which rule refused your request. Nothing on the block page itself will let you through, and reloading only sends the same request again.

What pushes a request past the second line

  • An address with a bad history. Data-centre and VPN exits, and addresses shared by many people, carry the behaviour of everyone who used them. This is the most common cause, and it is why the block often disappears on a different network.
  • Headers that disagree with the browser. A user-agent switcher or a rewriting proxy produces a request that contradicts itself, which many rules treat as automation outright.
  • A connection another program made. Antivirus HTTPS scanning and company gateways open the connection themselves; the site sees a client that is not the browser it claims.
  • A browser that says it is automated. If software is driving the browser, the flag it sets is often enough on its own.
  • A country or network the site refuses. Some sites block whole regions or providers. Nothing in your browser changes that.

What to try, in order

  1. Turn off the VPN or proxy and reload. If the page opens, the exit address was the cause; pick an exit in your own country or leave the tunnel off for this site.
  2. Try another network for one page: a phone hotspot is the quickest test. If it opens there, the address is the cause and no browser setting will fix it.
  3. Turn off user-agent, language and privacy extensions, then restart the browser and try again.
  4. Pause antivirus HTTPS scanning for a test, or exclude the site from it.
  5. If none of that works, write to the site with the reference number. It is the one piece of information they need to unblock you.

In the order they most often turn out to be the one. That order is a judgment about this symptom, not a reading of your machine — read your browser and these become rows with your own values in them, ranked by arithmetic instead of by opinion.

  1. Shared exit address

    Thousands of other people reach the web through the same address you do.

    • Turn the VPN off for the site that keeps challenging you, if you can accept that.
    • On a public or campus network, switch to a mobile hotspot for the checkout or login you are trying to finish.
    • If your provider uses carrier-grade NAT, ask them for a dedicated address — some offer one, most for a fee.

    There is no setting on your machine that changes this. The address is assigned to you by whoever runs the network.

  2. Request headers

    What your browser sends with each request disagrees with what it tells the page.

    • Turn off any user-agent switcher or language-spoofing extension, then restart the browser. These usually change one side only.
    • Check the browser's language list (Settings → Languages) and put the language you actually read first.
    • If security software or a company proxy rewrites your traffic, the headers can change on the way out. Test once on a home connection with that software paused.
  3. Connection

    Something between your browser and the site is making the connection for it.

    • In your antivirus, find the setting called HTTPS scanning, web shield or SSL inspection and turn it off for a test.
    • Check for a system or browser proxy: Windows Settings → Network → Proxy, macOS System Settings → Network → Details → Proxies. Turn off any you did not set up on purpose.
    • On a work network a company gateway does this on purpose. That is not yours to change; ask whoever runs it to exclude the site you need.

    When a company gateway makes the connection, no browser setting changes what the site sees.

  4. Automation flag

    This browser is telling every site it is being driven by software.

    • Close any browser window that was opened by a testing or automation tool, including Selenium, Playwright and Puppeteer.
    • If you did not start one, check your extensions — a remote-control or screen-sharing extension can set the same flag.
    • Reopen the browser normally from its own icon and run this reading again.

What people search when this is happening

Why was I blocked from a website with no captcha?
Because your request scored past the line where the site stops offering a challenge. The usual causes are a VPN or shared exit address, headers that contradict the browser, or a connection made by security software instead of the browser.
What is the reference number on a block page?
An ID the site's owner can look up to see which rule refused your request. Include it if you contact the site; it is the fastest way to get the block reviewed.
Will clearing cookies fix a block?
Rarely. A block is usually decided on the address, the headers and the connection, which cookies do not change. Changing network is the quickest test.

READ AT PRIOR TABLE ED. 1.0.0 · 2026-10-13 · ASSUMED, NOT MEASURED

The rank is taken against 15 written assumptions about how common each value is and 16 written weights about how much each one matters. 9 of them we think are probably wrong. Real counts from the browsers these sites have read appear beside a row, never inside its rank. Read the assumptions →

The rows you cannot fix from a settings page

A VPN you need for work, an address your ISP shares with a thousand other subscribers, a laptop with no graphics chip, a hardened profile that breaks the sites it was meant to protect — none of these have a checkbox. What is left is to present a reading that is internally consistent and ordinary on purpose, instead of one that is accidentally strange.

Donut Browser does that at the engine level: its Wayfern Chromium fork applies the fingerprint through CDP injection rather than patching JavaScript in the page, and it refuses to launch a profile whose proxy exit country, time zone and language contradict the profile's own fingerprint — which is the top row of most readings on this site. It is AGPL-3.0, it has no telemetry of any kind, and it runs on macOS, Windows and Linux.

Stated plainly: this site has no test results showing what any particular anti-bot service does with any particular browser, and neither does Donut Browser's own repository. What can be checked is the source, which is public.

Download Donut Browser

Free · AGPL-3.0 · github.com/zhom/donutbrowser