Hi, I had this same problem a while ago, where it would give me error 403, forbidden.
I found that I had to add a header called 'User-Agent' with "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; it; rv:1.8.1.11)Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11" to make it think it was a web browser and wouldn't get blocked.
My code for my (python) thingy is
https://github.com/Cabey4/4613-Auto-Scout
but it looks like you've already sorted it. But if anyone else gets a 403 forbidden error with the TBA/The Blue Alliance api that's probably why.