Problems with tor and the forum | Bitcointalksearch.org

hilariousandco

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Quote from: Morbo on January 04, 2014, 03:14:08 PM

Wouldn't a recaptcha help against spam bots? I'd certainly choose to guess a captcha occasionally than to rely on something that gets randomly baned.

I think it's probably more just banning users/connections that are spamming and scamming as opposed to bots, but I could be wrong.

Morbo

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Wouldn't a recaptcha help against spam bots? I'd certainly choose to guess a captcha occasionally than to rely on something that gets randomly baned.

Dogtanian

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I understand the reasoning for it, but obviously it doesn't really work against spammers or scammers as they'll just keep hitting new identity, but it is annoying to to other users.

Weirdly I had about 2-3 hours or browsing today without being booted off.

DeboraMeeks

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The problem is with spammers abusing tor and getting banned (and IP banned) making the node useless with the forum. One of the solutions is automatically un-banning tor nodes but that might increase spamming bots.

BadBear

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Quote from: bromide on January 04, 2014, 09:50:09 AM

Quote from: BadBear on December 29, 2013, 10:53:29 AM

Protecting people's privacy is a fail policy?

Please explain how banning Tor exit nodes protects people's privacy. Not complaining, simply curious.

It doesn't, but not letting mods see ips does, and since mods do the majority of the banning these days, it's bound to happen. There are flaws with most of the solutions I've seen posed but I'd rather not elaborate for various reasons.

Dogtanian

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I use TOR and was hardly able to post yesterday because after I'd logged in and waited the 6 minutes by the time I tried to post again it had changed over to a banned connection and I had to start the process over and this kept repeating. Saying that, it's only happened a few times today, but it was almost constant yesterday. Very frustrating when it happens.

bromide

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Quote from: BadBear on December 29, 2013, 10:53:29 AM

Protecting people's privacy is a fail policy?

Please explain how banning Tor exit nodes protects people's privacy. Not complaining, simply curious.

Morbo

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Someone who is abusing the request new identity feature too often is creating an anomaly pattern by trying to use new circuits much more often than the tor protocol itself does internally (10 minutes I think). Match that against the access log to bitcointalk - there will be multiple requests for same URL coming from different tor exit nodes (because the identity has changed), add some browser fingerprint metadata and you get a correlation attack against the person who keeps requesting new identities to change the exit node.

When you have a list of proxies and half of them are banned, it's fine to iterate over them to find the unbanned ones by trial and error. But tor is not a proxy, tor is an anonymizer. And misusing it just as plain proxy harms the anonymity. That's why I keep calling the bitcointalk tor policy wrong, because it encourages misuse of tor to browse the forum. Having either all tor exit nodes whitelisted or all of them blacklisted would be much better.

bromide

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Quote from: Welsh on December 29, 2013, 12:03:45 PM

Quote from: Morbo on December 29, 2013, 11:35:18 AM

Just in case if you missed the context - abusing the get new identity feature of tor to play lottery and find out an exit node that's not blocked by bitcointalk is the exact opposite of protecting people's privacy.

Care to elaborate? What's the harm to hitting that button every so often?

The problem's more and more nodes are getting blacklisted, so there are times when I need to hit the button ~4 times in a row, which is pretty frustrating. Sometimes this happens when i'm trying to post, losing everything I have written in the process.*

Spammers can circumvent this by scripting logon/posting, but these scripts are not an option when Tor is used for its intended purpose, security.

*Happened as I was trying to post this.

Welsh

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Quote from: Morbo on December 29, 2013, 11:35:18 AM

Just in case if you missed the context - abusing the get new identity feature of tor to play lottery and find out an exit node that's not blocked by bitcointalk is the exact opposite of protecting people's privacy.

Care to elaborate? What's the harm to hitting that button every so often?

Morbo

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Quote from: BadBear on December 29, 2013, 10:53:29 AM

Protecting people's privacy is a fail policy?

Just in case if you missed the context - abusing the get new identity feature of tor to play lottery and find out an exit node that's not blocked by bitcointalk is the exact opposite of protecting people's privacy.

BadBear

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Protecting people's privacy is a fail policy?

Morbo

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Quote from: hilariousandco on December 29, 2013, 09:56:02 AM

If you're using tor just hit new identity.

this is an ugly workaround for a fail forum policy

hilariousandco

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Quote from: jackjack on December 29, 2013, 10:00:33 AM

Quote from: hilariousandco on December 29, 2013, 09:56:02 AM

Quote from: zxm7001 on December 29, 2013, 09:29:02 AM

please do not banned me,i do not sent a spam.

If you're using tor just hit new identity. I don't know whether mods consider just posting wallet addresses as spam, but that's all you seem to post, so maybe contribute in some other threads at least.

Wow
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/zxm7001-166488

Some people like free shit(coins) I guess haha.

jackjack

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Quote from: hilariousandco on December 29, 2013, 09:56:02 AM

Quote from: zxm7001 on December 29, 2013, 09:29:02 AM

please do not banned me,i do not sent a spam.

If you're using tor just hit new identity. I don't know whether mods consider just posting wallet addresses as spam, but that's all you seem to post, so maybe contribute in some other threads at least.

Wow
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/zxm7001-166488

hilariousandco

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Quote from: zxm7001 on December 29, 2013, 09:29:02 AM

please do not banned me,i do not sent a spam.

If you're using tor just hit new identity. I don't know whether mods consider just posting wallet addresses as spam, but that's all you seem to post, so maybe contribute in some other threads at least.

zxm7001

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please do not banned me,i do not sent a spam.

Morbo

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Quote from: BadBear on December 27, 2013, 09:36:04 AM

whining

This isn't whining, this is called usability. And a key component of usability is fluency. Something that occasionally breaks / doesn't work is inconsistent and frustrating. From the point of user experience, this is worse than something that always works, or than something that never works.

Quote from: BadBear on December 27, 2013, 09:36:04 AM

like your finger is going to fall off from overexertion. If this seriously ranks a place on your list of things to worry about then you've got it pretty good. First world problems up in here.

I wonder if anyone brought this argument on the table in context of mods having to manually moderate each spam post instead of having the enabled in-place automation that filters a big chunk of that big pile of spam. I am sure in that context such an argument would be qualified as very inappropriate.

BadBear

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Why does it have to be one or the other? Just hit the button and stop whining like your finger is going to fall off from overexertion. If this seriously ranks a place on your list of things to worry about then you've got it pretty good. First world problems up in here.

Morbo

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Quote from: stompix on December 27, 2013, 05:35:39 AM

I've seen this message at least 4-5 times a day and a quick reconnect solves everything.

are you saying that having to reconnect to be able to post something to a forum is normal practice? i really don't think so

the management of bitcointalk is welcome to remove all tor exit nodes from the ban list like it was suggested

the management of bitcointalk is welcome as well to ban all tor exit nodes so those who don't want to trade their privacy for the chance to post in this forum could say kthxbye, move on and start spreading the word about bitcointalk not being tor friendly

the intermediate and uncertain stance that they have adopted is only going to get more disappointed users as the user base keeps growing IMHO (and it will probably keep growing)

Topic: Problems with tor and the forum (Read 11998 times)