VPN Users Are Getting Blocked and Rate-Limited on Anime and Manga Sites

VPN users are getting blocked and rate-limited on anime and manga sites. The anime database AniDB says it has banned most of the VPN providers it can find. The manga piracy site Comix automatically blocks addresses that send too many requests, for up to 30 days, and tells readers to avoid VPNs. MangaDex warns that VPN users share their rate limits with everyone else on the same address.

All three give the same reason: scrapers and bots sending more traffic than their servers can handle.

AniDB: "several orders of magnitude"

AniDB moved behind Cloudflare in spring 2026, a senior moderator wrote in a forum thread opened on September 27 to collect all Cloudflare and VPN complaints. The site had always faced scrapers, DDoS attacks and spam, the moderator explained.

"With the advent of AI, this volume has increased several orders of magnitude, to the point where it clearly is unmanageable," they wrote.

AniDB uses Cloudflare's free plan, which has fewer features than the paid tiers, and says it has maxed out the free settings, including the "Bot Fight" mode. The site raises only about $2,000 to $3,000 a year in donations, according to the post.

"We have also progressively banned most every VPN provider we can find, as lots of attack vectors come from VPNs," the moderator added. AniDB has also temporarily blocked or restricted entire ISPs, subnets and even countries, because attackers keep moving where they attack from.

There will be no exceptions. Blocked VPNs stay blocked unless the attacks coming through them stop, a VPN that becomes a new source of attacks will be blocked as well, and blocked ISPs, subnets or countries will only be unblocked once the attacks from them end.

When a user in the thread asked AniDB to publish a full data dump so others could carry on if the site faltered, another senior moderator replied: "You will not receive a full data dump. Ever. Unless we actually shut down."

Comix: blocks of up to 30 days

The manga piracy site Comix posted a pinned announcement titled "About Cloudflare IP Blocks" in late September.

"Scrapers and bots have been using up our resources and overloading our servers," the site's admin wrote. Comix now automatically blocks IP addresses that send an unusually high number of requests. A block lasts from 3 to 30 days, depending on whether the address belongs to a home connection, a hosting or data center provider, or a VPN. "Some IP ranges from certain providers are blocked permanently."

The announcement lists ways to avoid a block, starting with "Avoid using VPNs or shared IPs." Readers are also told not to use third-party apps to read or mass-download chapters, not to refresh pages rapidly and not to open many chapter tabs at once. Blocks cannot be lifted on request, the admin added.

Comments under the post, now locked, came from readers who said they were blocked while reading normally, on school Wi-Fi or right after switching networks. Others wrote that they rely on a VPN because Comix is blocked in their country. Some governments, such as South Korea's, order internet providers to block pirate sites.

MangaDex: 10 chapters for guests

MangaDex, which hosts fan translations, went through the same problem earlier in the year. In a May 4 announcement, staff said "massive amounts of abuse from scrapers" had degraded the service and caused lengthy downtimes. Under the measures announced then, visitors who are not logged in can read only 10 chapters per day, and advanced search is limited. A free account removes the cap.

MangaDex's API documentation spells out how this affects VPN users. Rate limits apply per IP address, and "if you're on a VPN, proxy or a shared network in general, the requests of other users on this network might affect your allowance." It also states that "an undocumented handful of IPv4 subnets are banned forever."

A wider problem

The sites describe the same pressure larger platforms have reported. In April 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation said that at least 65% of its most resource-intensive traffic came from bots, much of it from scrapers collecting training data for large language models.

For VPN users, the problem is that they share addresses with many others. When a scraper uses the same VPN, its traffic counts against everyone behind that address, and an automatic block hits all of them. AniDB and Comix both say they will not make individual exceptions.