According to AWS, the specific issue with Cloudflare has been set to “resolved”
However, gcaptain.com still returns “error 403”. No response from gcaptain, neither via e-mail nor in this forum. A bit disappointing…
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Strange. I’m not having issues and I’m connecting through a VPN (and Starlink), so I’d expect headaches.
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I’m still having to check in via Cloudflare, which never happened before today. Other than that, getting through -
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It seems, that the website recently (three days ago) integrated the Cloudflare Signpost widget, which is commonly employed to block bots. Most of the time, the widget is supposed to be transparent to the user, i.e. invisible. Only, when in doubt, the widget forces user interaction (ticking a box), but never prompts for google-like captcha riddles.
The Cloudflare widget itself does not seem part of the problem, as it results in success on all of my devices.
The problem seems to lie beyond the widget, maybe the redirection process from the widget to the gcaptain website is flawed, depending on geolocation (since cloudflare and AWS, as most providers, use a distributed, complex web of partially fail-over clusters of server farms). That might explain, why some people are entirely unaffected.
FIRST:
THEN:
It is frustrating, that nobody at gcaptain seems to give a …
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At home I am behind a tightly set firewall, but that does not explain the problem, as other cloudflare-secured websites work fine, and the problem with gcaptain persists, even if i try to access via G5 mobile data, which are not firewalled at all.
Also, I do not seem to be the only one who experiences the 403.
The error seems to be thrown by nginx, which is often employed as reverse proxy, and for load balancing/geolocation purposes. This software is a bit complex to administrate. Maybe some glitch there.
From Mike Schuler
Aug 22, 2025, 10:33 AM (2 days ago)We were experiencing a DDoS attack the past two days but I believe we have it sorted now. Let me know if you continue to have issues.
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The website loads now, but the layout is either corrupted or does not load correctly following the… event; there are some overlapping elements and it doesn’t look “right”.
But then again there’s a Temu ad over the reply button right here as well… 
Unfortunately, no change here, I am still experiencing the nginx 403 error…
🥳gcaptain.com site seems back to normal operations👍🏻
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