A Study of Tor Users and Wikipedians

Re:A Study of Tor Users and Wikipedians by gh1 on Saturday October 15, 2016 @04:48PM (#12715588)

I think Hacker News also blocks Tor users by hellbanning them. Anyone here can confirm?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Study of Tor Users and Wikipedians by hiq on Saturday October 15, 2016 @07:52PM (#12716166)

It's been a few months (9+) now that I only visit HN using Tor, and I have not encountered any problem (apart from the annoying Cloudflare pages, which I avoid using another Tor circuit). I created and used my account using non-Tor ip addresses before that though.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Study of Tor Users and Wikipedians by lucb1e on Saturday October 15, 2016 @09:47PM (#12716420)

Can confirm. Created this account, say, 5 years ago (just estimating) without Tor, used Tor for regular browsing a lot between 24 and 12 months ago (corporate firewall during internship), and since then stopped using Tor again for regular browsing. Did not experience any kind of block at any point.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Study of Tor Users and Wikipedians by gh1 on Saturday October 15, 2016 @10:08PM (#12716483)

It seems like only new accounts using Tor are hellbanned. If an account has sufficient karma or age or some combination of both, then it is not.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Study of Tor Users and Wikipedians by cypherpunks01 on Saturday October 15, 2016 @05:39PM (#12715763)

Huh, no replies.. I guess it's not true then?

Kidding aside, I don't believe Tor is being specifically targeted by HN in any way. If there is any auto-banning mechanism in the codebase at all (is there?) I would think it might be IP ratelimit-based, and in that case it's possible for unlucky HN Tor users who share an IP with a HN Tor spammer to suffer collateral damage.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Study of Tor Users and Wikipedians by gh1 on Saturday October 15, 2016 @05:56PM (#12715828)

A friend of mine (who signed up recently) tried to use Tor and got hellbanned within an hour. Another friend tried using a VPN provider IVPN and was banned from the get go. But it is possible that this is happening because of IP rate limits. Would appreciate it if a HN mod can confirm.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Study of Tor Users and Wikipedians by DanBC on Saturday October 15, 2016 @06:28PM (#12715917)

> Would appreciate it if a HN mod can confirm.

It's probably better to email them. They don't always see these threads.

Here are three threads from 2 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7894816#7895823

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8203164#8206090

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7825556

The new things dang talks about are the [vouch] link, which means users can rescue comments marked as dead, and bring mod attention to the account to turn off the dead. (I think that's how it works. I'm not a mod. Here's the comment that makes me think it works that way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10624178#10638699 )

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Study of Tor Users and Wikipedians by mirimir on Saturday October 15, 2016 @08:28PM (#12716259)

I hit HN through IVPN, with no problems.

[ Parent | on HN ]