Usenet asking for user name and password (again)

[#1]

I appreciate that this topic has been raised before, but not for some time: for the past few days, I've been unable to connect to Usenet because I'm asked for a user name and password.  Can anyone please confirm (or otherwise) that this is a (hopefully temporary) general problem as has happened in the past, and not something at my end?

I'm using Thunderbird on a Windows 10 PC.  Many thanks.

[#2]

That's odd. It seems to be OK here. Nor have I had any problems over the last few days.

Thunderbird 128.9.1 on Windows 11.

[#3]

That's helpful thanks; it looks as though it's a problem with my system, though I don't see what it could be: nothing changed lately that I'm aware of.

[#4]

@BertCoules are you definitely connecting via the Plusnet broadband network? i.e. no VPNs or anything like that in use?

[#5]

@bobpullen That was it; thanks for the thought.  The VPN (Cloudflare WARP) doesn't block the Plusnet website, where I can log in with no problems, but evidently the Usenet side of things is different.

[#6 · Accepted solution]

If you have a VPN service, and get ANY connection issues, then the first thing to do is to turn OFF the VPN, and try it again.

One of the main purposes of using a VPN is so that you can "pretend to be somewhere else", which may allow you access to foreign web sites (which now believe that you are in their country!)

The opposite is also true: a UK website might, because of your VPN, think you are in the US, and block you! Turning the VPN off will make you (hopefully) appear to be in the UK.

Not only can VPNs affect web sites, it can also affect sending emails.

[#7]

Thanks for that.  As you might have seen from my previous post, that was indeed the problem.