I live in Rome, NY, have Spectrum, and previously had Time Warner. On my MacBook Pro, using Safari, I have never been blocked, even though Safari says “Not Secure” in front of FR’s URL address. I use a VPN on my old iMac. It’s so old, there are no updates for it. I ended up having to stop using Safari, because I kept getting messages that it couldn’t connect to the site because it couldn’t make a secure connection. Since then I’ve been using Firefox, which can’t be updated either. When I’ve used the VPN, and used Toronto, Canada as the ISP address, I could initially access my Netflix account on it, but it will now not connect at all...just sits there trying to connect. I can only access it if I use a U.S. VPN address, or turn the VPN on that computer off.
The “not secure” message will go away if you use FR’s secure https URL:
https://www.freerepublic.com/tag/*/index