IP blocked by Cloudflare?

[BigheadSMZ]

Last night I was happily uploading my very first mod:
https://www.nexusmods.com/nierautomata/mods/688

While uploading, I was just browsing the site normally. Then between clicks I get this error:

And now I can't even access the site without using my VPN and changing my IP. I didn't do anything except upload the mod on one tab while browsing the site on another tab. What could have possibly triggered this? What can I even do about it? It couldn't have been the mod as its just some videos in a zip file and processed fine after I activated my VPN. Has anyone else ever had this happen? I contacted nexusmods support via email and got some generic response about adblockers or other addons which was not helpful in the least. This is not a browser or addon issue, my IP was blocked by Cloudflare for seemingly no reason. This comes up on all browsers: Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Brave. I mean I guess I can just activate my VPN when visiting this site but still pretty annoying considering I don't even have the faintest clue on how to attack a website like it claims. 

[Pickysaurus]

This should be a temporary issue caused by something sending an abnormal number of requests to the website in a short period. Has it unlocked again now? 

[BigheadSMZ]

Unfortunately no, still blocked. It's only been about two days, maybe it takes awhile? It's not a huge issue I guess since VPN works, but still somewhat irritating considering i didn't do anything wrong. The videos mod I uploaded was fairly huge, and I was updating the details quite a bit, while also browsing the site, so maybe that somehow triggered it. Either way I would assume these action all fall under "normal behavior" and I still don't have the faintest idea of what happened. One of the files I was uploading was halfway done, on another tab I clicked on private messages, checked a message from one user, clicked on another user, then it popped up and I haven't been able to access the site with my main IP address since.  

[Pickysaurus]

Hmm these blocks generally last no more than an hour. If it's still happening I'm not entirely sure why. It's possible you're on a shared IP that is also used by malicious/bot traffic (without your VPN). Or something in your browser setup triggered the protection somehow. I will raise it with our team, but CloudFlare uses a bit of a "secret sauce" to protect websites so it's often intentionally unclear why it was triggered. 

[ja82982]

This just started to affect me as well. I'm using Edge browser.

[BigheadSMZ]

I got a response from NexusMods support team saying my IP was used by a malicious actor. They unbanned my IP but now I'm thinking I'll never access the web without my VPN active ever again. I have no idea who could have done it, how they did it, or why but I'm going to start taking online security a lot more seriously since I've never had anything like this happen before. I maxed out the settings on my router's security, and I'm going to reinstall Windows on all my PCs on the chance any of them are compromised. 

[Pickysaurus]

12 hours ago, BigheadSMZ said:

I got a response from NexusMods support team saying my IP was used by a malicious actor. They unbanned my IP but now I'm thinking I'll never access the web without my VPN active ever again. I have no idea who could have done it, how they did it, or why but I'm going to start taking online security a lot more seriously since I've never had anything like this happen before. I maxed out the settings on my router's security, and I'm going to reinstall Windows on all my PCs on the chance any of them are compromised. 

It doesn't mean your PC is compromised. IPs are frequently recycled. So a spammer or malicious user may have used it at some point (which resulted in a block) and it got rerolled to you when you last reset your router.