Ask HN: Is Firefox causing me to be IP-banned from HN?

Hi Everyone. I have just been IP banned for the 2nd time in quick succession by HN. No complaint at all about that, in fact I want to thank those that have taken the time to show me logs of what is going on - appreciate your help!

I am bombarding HN with HEAD requests and yet from my point of view I am doing absolutely nothing differently in how I have been using HN for years. I use Firefox on Windows 7 64 and generally keep HN open in a tab. Every few minutes, or hours, I manually click on the title to see the latest updates to the front page and comments. Pretty normal useage I would say, and up to now never been a problem.

Clearly something is different and my browser, or something else is turning me into a rude user.

- Is it possible that keeping HN open in a tab is causing Firefox to send HEAD requests rapidly enough to get me banned?

- How can I test this?

- Aside from using another browser, how can I avoid this in future?

- Is anyone else noticing this sort of behaviour?