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403 Forbidden Error in webui (piefed.zeromedia.vip)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social

HI! First, I'm very sorry if this is the wrong community, if there's a better comm, please point me in their direction.

I've been running my own piefed instance for a few months now, but recently (maybe? idk how long this has been happening), if I try to open the webui from a private browser tab, or from another device, I get a 403 forbidden error code. {"code":403,"status":"Forbidden"}. Is this a common issue?

I've been trying to look this up online and it seems like it might be nginx, but I have many other things running behind nginx with that don't act like this, so I figured I'd ask here before going to a more general nginx community.

You're more than welcome to try going to my instance yourself, at piefed.zeromedia.vip

UPDATE:

Turning the "private instance" setting on and then back off seems to have fixed it. I'm not 100% yet but I can currently access piefed on all devices/browser sessions

Update 2:

That didn't quite fix it, for some reason, turning the private instance setting on does fix it, but as soon as I turn it off again, it breaks

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[-] rimu@piefed.social 5 points 2 weeks ago

In the form at /admin/misc, turn off the Honeypot. It's a checkbox near the bottom. Does that help?

[-] guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip 2 points 2 weeks ago
[-] rimu@piefed.social 3 points 2 weeks ago

Your browser must be prefetching the honeypot url... Which browser do you have?

[-] guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip 3 points 2 weeks ago

Just standard firefox, it happens on desktop and mobile, and it looks like it also happens on ios safari.

[-] rimu@piefed.social 2 points 2 weeks ago

If you set the FLASK_DEBUG environment variable to 1 and then go to piefed.zeromedia.vip/check_ip does it correctly detect your IP address? If not then bot traffic, hitting the honeypot, would be getting detected as the same user as everyone else so when the bot IP is banned so is all anonymous users.

[-] guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Either it's not correctly detecting it or I must be setting the variable wrong, going to piefed.../check_ip returns a blank page with "not found".

In my .env.docker file I've placed FLASK_DEBUG=1 , is that correct?

I would be willing to bet that this is why it's behaving this way. I have it running behind nginx and I'm not 100% sure nginx is passing the ip's

[-] rimu@piefed.social 2 points 2 weeks ago

Sorry it's /test_ip not /check_ip.

[-] guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip 1 points 2 weeks ago

Yep, definitely not the right ip, it's returning 172.21.0.1, which I think is a docker thing. Any ideas on how I can fix that?

this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
9 points (100.0% liked)

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