On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 6:36 PM, Jasper Deng jasper@jasperswebsite.com wrote:
This question is analogous to the question of open proxies. The answer has universally been that the costs (abuse) are just too high.
No, it's not analogous to just permitting open proxies as no one in this thread is suggesting just flipping it on.
I proposed issuing blind exemption tokens up-thread as an example mechanism which would preserve the rate limiting of abusive use without removing privacy.
However, we might consider doing what the freenode IRC network does. Freenode requires SASL authentication to connect on Tor, which basically means only users with registered accounts can use it. The main reason for hardblocking and not allowing registered accounts on-wiki via Tor is that CheckUsers need useful IP data. But it might be feasible if we just force all account creation to happen on "real" IPs, although that still hides some data from CheckUsers.
What freenode does is not functionally useful for Tor users. In my first hand experience it manages to enable abusive activity while simultaneously eliminating Tor's usefulness at protecting its users.
The only value it provides is providing a pretext of "tor support" without actually doing something good... and we already have the "you can get an IPblock-exempt (except you can't really, and if you do it'll get randomly revoked." if all we want is a pretext. :)