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I think Hacker News also blocks Tor users by hellbanning them. Anyone here can confirm?
by gh1 10y ago
I think Hacker News also blocks Tor users by hellbanning them. Anyone here can confirm?
- cypherpunks01 10y agoHuh, 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.
- gh1 10y agoA 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.
- DanBC 10y ago> 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=7894816#7895823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8203164#8206090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8203164#8206090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7825556 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10624178#10638699 )
- fudgepack99 10y agoYes it is happening. My old tor account that I never used to post was banned
- mirimir 10y agoI hit HN through IVPN, with no problems.
- hiq 10y agoIt'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.
- lucb1e 10y agoCan 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.
- gh1 10y agoIt 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.