Here’s a mystery to entertain you as you segue into the weekend. Jerror was complaining on the Emacs subredit that their university had blocked MELPA. What?!? Why in the world would anyone block MELPA? It doesn’t appear to be one of those “let’s block everything we don’t use ourselves” that you sometimes see from less than competent IT departments. According to Jerror, the only other site he could determine that was being blocked was Libgen. Even if you think blocking libgen makes sense, why block MELPA?
The last time I checked, there was no answer. There were plenty of comments but most of those were ironic, usually accusing the IT department of being Vim users. One commenter suggested that this is the result of subscribing to some prepackaged blacklist but that seems to be malfeasance and, really, only pushes the mystery back one step.
Many of the comments offered ways of getting around the block, which in a way makes the problem go away but it still doesn’t answer the question of why the site was blocked in the first place. Jerror says he hasn’t yet pinged the IT department so maybe that will provide an answer. In the mean time, if you’ve got a possible explanation, let us all know. Of course, it doesn’t really matter much but it’s one of those things you come across and think, “What’s this all about?”