Moon Books Coding, Writing, Music and Graphics Contest

[wraggster]

via drunkencoders

MoonBooks is running several competitions for reviews. Here's a quick summary of the different categories and their prizes:

DS Game Reviews - 6x Acekard 2
Hardware Review - 2x Acekard 2
Movie Review - 4x Acekard 2
Book Review - 4x Acekard 2
Articles / Non-Fiction - 2x Acekard 2
Fiction / Poetry - 2x Acekard 2
Homebrew DS Game Coding - 2x Acekard 2
Homebrew DS Application Coding - 2x Acekard 2
Graphics - 2x Acekard 2
Audio - 2x Acekard 2
DSGamemaker Game - 5x registration keys to DSGamemaker

Head on over to his site for more details & rules. That's a lot of Acekard 2's for prizes, might want to enter, a lot of them don't even require any coding. Important to note, you have to pay shipping fees if you win an Acekard.

http://moonbooks.net/moonbooks/page.php?123

[Pilot_51]

I'm not sure how accepted it is to ask for help in a news post, but seeing this post and that Moonbooks is still online when it appears down to me, I thought I should post here anyway.

Does anyone have any idea why I haven't been able to access Moonbooks for several months now while apparently most other people seem to be able to access it? I've tried it in Firefox 3, IE7, and Google Chrome in XP Home SP3, Firefox 3 in Ubuntu 8.04 on another system, and DS Organize v3.1129. IE7 gives a 403 error, DSO says incomplete download, and everything else just gives a blank white page.
I have Comcast in Michigan, USA. I asked a friend in Australia and one in Canada and they could access it.
As far as I can tell it's a problem outside my network, I've reset it a few times since the problem started and I haven't changed any settings that would block a single site, although with several people on the network I can't connect directly to the modem unless absolutely necessary.
I did a traceroute on moonbooks.net and there were 4 hops on atlas.cogentco.com that were over 200ms, but it still went through. I asked the Canadian friend to run a traceroute and he got some low-ping hops on atlas.cogentco.com, but they were all on different 4th-level or deeper subdomains.

On a slightly related note, over the past 6 months I've noticed a few scattered reports from other people that haven't been able to access single occasionally-visited sites for months while everyone else could access it. It leaves me curious whether it's an early effect of net filtering (as opposed to net neutrality) by ISPs, which makes it hard for the masses to find out about it since each case is extremely localized. A few months ago there was a more wide-spread situation which lasted for a few hours where several people in a chat room were unable to access sites such as GoDaddy or Amazon while others could access them, most of them with the problem apparently had Comcast but I don't think all.

Moonbooks has the best legal media content for the DS I've ever seen, so I'm sure you know how much I want access to it.

Edit: Nevermind, I used a proxy to get in and contact the owner to fix it. He didn't say what the problem was, so I'll just assume he banned an IP range which I was in.