Why do I receive a 403 Forbidden error when trying to create an account?

Because of the high percentage of accounts created for spam purposes and the low numbers of accounts created for legitimate site participation from some countries, we have been forced to block access to the account creation page for internet connections coming from those countries. If your internet connection is located in one of those countries, you will not be able to create a Dreamwidth account. We apologize for the inconvenience, but spam accounts and inauthentic accounts take up entirely too much of our administrative time and resources, and we need to be aggressive in blocking them.

The current restricted countries are: Bangladesh, Cambodia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Pakistan, Singapore, Turkey, and Vietnam. We review the countries affected by the spam blocking restrictions regularly and may add or remove countries as necessary.

If your internet connection is not from one of the countries in the above list, but you receive 403 Forbidden errors when attempting to create an account anyway, please email support@dreamwidth.org and include your IP address. (If you don't know your IP address, you can get it at What Is My IP?)