Dex-chan lover
- Joined
- May 26, 2018
- Messages
- 1,683
Some of you are probably familiar with HakuNeko as a common option for downloading manga from this site. Well, I don't know what your developers did during this past Sunday's maintenance, but whatever it was, HakuNeko suddenly ceased to be able to connect to MangaDex afterwards on my end. Strangely enough, this problem is not affecting all users, as when I raised the issue on the app's Github repository, its developer said that everything is completely fine on their end, and nobody else appears to have reported the same problem (though that doesn't necessarily mean I'm the only one).
All attempts to debug the issue were met with failure after failure, until today I got hit with an idea after Pixiv suffered a seemingly selective pseudo-crash that left a seemingly arbitrary selection of users unable to access the site in anyway unless they used a VPN to spoof their geolocation. The idea: use ProtonVPN - which I had used to get around Pixiv's pseudo-crash - to mask my geolocation and see if that does anything. And to my surprise, it actually did: as long as the VPN connection is on, HakuNeko can access MangaDex like normal. Using GoodbyeDPI as an alternative (by adding mangadex.org to the blacklist) also works.
Keep in mind that during all this, I was able to access MangaDex on desktop just fine, though the same could not be said on mobile; neither app nor browser can access the site.
Oh, if you're wondering where the hell I am to be facing all this trouble, I'm in the Arabian Peninsula.
So the question that I wish to pose to the staff is this: WTH did this Sunday maintenance do that now requires geolocation-spoofing to make HakuNeko (and presumably mobile phones) able to access your site? It's fine if you wish to keep the details classified for security reasons; I just hope that you will have your devs look into the problem and see if it's fixable.
All attempts to debug the issue were met with failure after failure, until today I got hit with an idea after Pixiv suffered a seemingly selective pseudo-crash that left a seemingly arbitrary selection of users unable to access the site in anyway unless they used a VPN to spoof their geolocation. The idea: use ProtonVPN - which I had used to get around Pixiv's pseudo-crash - to mask my geolocation and see if that does anything. And to my surprise, it actually did: as long as the VPN connection is on, HakuNeko can access MangaDex like normal. Using GoodbyeDPI as an alternative (by adding mangadex.org to the blacklist) also works.
Keep in mind that during all this, I was able to access MangaDex on desktop just fine, though the same could not be said on mobile; neither app nor browser can access the site.
Oh, if you're wondering where the hell I am to be facing all this trouble, I'm in the Arabian Peninsula.
So the question that I wish to pose to the staff is this: WTH did this Sunday maintenance do that now requires geolocation-spoofing to make HakuNeko (and presumably mobile phones) able to access your site? It's fine if you wish to keep the details classified for security reasons; I just hope that you will have your devs look into the problem and see if it's fixable.