We are getting tentative reports from people that their ISPs are no longer blocking TaleSpire. If you still have issues connecting, please reach out. We want to contact these providers to get this fixed.
From what we can tell:
Some ISPs have a built-in security system for home users.
They may use "risk scores" that they get from some services online (sometimes they run their own service too, sometimes not)
Since they can't know for sure whether a domain is being used for legit purposes, the scores are based on a bunch of heuristics they have made up.
For some reason, something heuristic decided we looked suspicious. So then any ISP that uses those scores to decide what to block, automatically blocked us.
Also, it's likely that some risk services rely on each other, so the problem can spread.
Yesterday was mainly spent finding and contacting services with "hey, we're just an indie game" emails, which, along with you folks reporting the issue to your ISPs, corrected the scores enough to get us unblocked.
The sucky thing is that, as far as we can tell, neither you nor we changed anything to cause this. We just got unlucky. We are going to try to tweak some things on our end to lower the risk of this happening again. But if it does, we'll do our damnedest to sort it out as fast as possible. At least we have some experience with it now!
A big thanks again to those who helped out.
Enjoy your day, and we'll chat again soon!