Re: Gentoo's response on them blocking access to their forums via Tor

[Chris Palmer <chris@xxxxxxx>]

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Sean wrote:

> But, I see no way for a website operator to ban folks using TOR from
> posting, but allow browsing...

First, Apache is incredibly configurable. Second, you could put the
banning logic in the program that accepts posts, and leave it out of the
program that assembles pages for reading.

> As the website operator faced with anonymous antagonizers...Would you
> force posters to authenticate from a particular IP address(an
> unworkable solution, if you want increased participation...)? Or are
> you suggesting that Gentoo implement only user bans instead of IP
> bans?

IP addresses are not identifiers for people. Web applications should use
a real authentication scheme.

And you don't necessarily need to ban people to effectively keep the
forum clean. Advogato's color scheme and Slashdot's default score (0 for
anonymous poster, 1 for authenticated poster) work well for helping
readers sort through the noise.


- --
http://www.eff.org/about/staff/#chris_palmer

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