Bitcoin Forum

What a welcome to bitcointalk forum.

Problem One: Proxy Ban
So i try to register my bitcointalk account through Tor browser and my account immediately gets a proxy ban.
Apparently i have to pay a given fee to be able to post or Send PMs

I really find this kind of policy weird
Why would i pay for the past evil usage of the given IP?
What happens if so many IP addresses get blacklisted? Does that mean new registrants have to pay the price?
Why not just let it be? (i mean, the abuser will just get another IP address and will continue carrying out his evil practice)

Problem Two: Endless Captchas

When i tried to log into my account after solving a ton full of captchas, i get this;



So what are we as Tor browser users supposed to do?

The said solution
Does not even fix a thing.

I think it would be good to let people know that using Tor browser is not advised when registering or logging into Bitcointalk.
So that we avoid wasting time.

Among other things i noticed are
- No verification message in my email to show if the email i used for registering is real or if i made a typo of my email when registering.
- No 2 Factor verification; for a crypto forum where big trades are executed every day and has been there for 10 years, this is a big shame.

Welcome to the forum...
I'm sorry to hear your initial experience wasn't all that positive, but there's a reason things seemed very hard...
This forum is (one of) the biggest crypto related forum(s) on the web, hundreds of new accounts get created each and every day. A lot of these accounts are created by scammers and spammers, sometimes automatically and in bulk. That's why Theymos added the "evil ip" function a long, long time ago. It's there to stop abusers from creating new accounts in bulk (the theory is that an abuser won't pay a small fee to activate his/her account if he's going to get it banned in a matter of hours). Sure, it doesn't stop all scammers, spammers, trolls, plagiarists,... but i hope it stops the bulk of them. Even if it stops 50% of them, i'd stil be in favor of the feature.

The sad thing is: as a real user with good intentions, you've become collateral damage in the war on spammers/scammers/plagiarists/trolls/... and that's not that good, but i don't see an alternative.

As for the captcha: i guess you're seeing the captcha because bitcointalk is using cloudflare as an external WAF/DDos protection/cache to protect us from the DDos attacks that took the forum down a while ago, and you've become collateral damage in the cloudflare methodology to...

Last but not least: a new forum software is being developed for years now, nobody knows when the forum will be migrated, but the new software should contain most (if not all) of the security features you (and most of us) crave... The thing is: Theymos seems a bit reluctant to developing extra features for SMF when the new forum software seems to be rather close to completion (but to be honest, to me it looks like the development isn't moving at all).

How to bypass the captcha:

1. Login to the forum as usual, using a captcha.
2. Follow the link https://bitcointalk.org/captcha_code.php. There will be generated for you link, going through which you will not enter the captcha.
3. Go to the forum using the link.

You can read the original thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5042674.0

I've just tried to login using the private Tor window in the Brave browser. I had to complete about 10 Captcha queries in a cloud service, and then I got the login page with another Captcha on it. I went back to a standard Brave window at that point. I don't really see what advantage logging in via Tor would give me. The Brave browser gives me privacy at a basic level, and that is more than enough for my activities here.

Most of those problems are there to prevent spam from bots I imagine, the merit already made things better in that regard

Your first problem really relies on your ISP's way of giving dynamic ip addresses. A common practice for isps is they give the same ip addresses on different clients it, your IP address now might have use before by a person who got permaban in the forum that is why your IP address is detected to be Proxy Banned. If you really want to bypass the payment for evil units you should just have waited as dynamic ip addresses are just temporary which means you could have a new one for a given time frame.

I see some potential in you so after going through a rough start, let me give you something that you may later consider valuable, merit ;)
Just before you do anything, read the rules  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=703657.0)and some other important info (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1689727.0).

Is this possible? Very unexpected, the forum's considerations are very comprehensive.

Welccome to bitcointalk.
Most of the issues you encountered could have been avoided, except notably the proxy ban, which I believe is to stop banned users and tagged users from opening new accounts.

Theymos has previously said that he does not want to make it any more difficult to join the forum so as not to scare away legitimate members as the spammers and those who simply want to earn on here will find ways through whichever hoops is used.
Hope you enjoy your stay.

Agree, OP looks like he could be a great asset - passed you enough merit to rank up again, stick with the pain if you are a tor guy - itll be worth it. Last person who I noticed early who was as educated as you turned out to be nullius!

go newbie

Firstly I wish you a warm welcome into the forum

Well all you have complained about is a no brainer and it's not Rock science to note it so I will not judge that you have a high intelligent quotient by that.

Yes the forum has some lapses at to regrets to some issues but on the bright side your interest in the forum and your zeal should come above that

This was a problem to me as a first time user... I hadn't logged in to my account yet and was unable to log in to it through Tor browser as i kept getting the message below after solving 10+ captchas each time.

The surprising thing is that when i switched to Firefox, i just solved only one captcha challenge and was able to log in immediately. I assumed there are probably extra restrictions laid out when one is using Tor browser, which i would prefer to use.

Otherwise thanks folks for the heart warming responses and helpful info I look forward to learning more from this community.

Sorry for the rough ordeal.
Sometimes things do not happen the way you expect them to. It's great that you are a hardliner and didn't just give up.
There's still plenty to learn here,
Welcome to the forum  :)

This is one side of a coin, but with this rough experience comes for example 70% less spam accounts and less scam accounts.
Worth making problems to 3% users while reducing 70% of spam/scam? I bet it is.

So i tried logging in through other common browsers that people who wouldn't really care much about privacy and trackers and it usually takes less than about a minute to get it.

Trying it with Tor browser requires too much patience.
As crosswalks, chimneys, cars, bicycles, traffic lights, Fire hydrants etc keep flying in and you keep identifying them, then this https://i.imgur.com/VJe3Jvu.png happens.
It means i have to start over again after solving nearly over 20 captchas.

So FatBen gets over it and tries again, same thing happens over and over again. I have never noticed this kind of things in other browsers and my internet connection is so stable.

What i would really love to understand is;
- Does google or cloudfare selectively and intentionally "punish" users of certain browsers like Tor?
- Do this captcha challenges vary from user to user? or does one's rank also determine how much captchas one is supposed to deal with when logging in?

I haven't been so much in the forum because of this problem. logging in was challenging. I did login through brave browser and there were a number of captcha to though they finally let me in but i would really prefer to do my stuff from Tor

Yes Cloudflare punishes Tor users, and challenges them with Google's ReCaptcha. This has been mitigated somewhat, and Cloudflare customers can enable a special option to alleviate the issue:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/content/images/2018/09/Screen-Shot-2018-09-20-at-7.36.11-AM.jpg
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-onion-service/

It isn't so much Tor Browser (which always use Tor) but any browser using Tor would get the same treatment. Some more recent versions of chromium/firefox behave a little better, but if you configure them to use Tor, you will see the same thing. Cloudflare wants the opposite of privacy, it wants to distinguish you from others, so it can block you if you are a bot. The other browsers leave more traces and you are easier to distinguish, so it lets you in faster.

BTW you haven't seen the worst of it. Don't ever, EVER run a Tor exit node from an IP you intend to browse the internet with in the following months...

If you see connection lost message with recaptcha, just use the refresh button. Repeated captchas and grainy images means they don't like you, you are not distinguishable enough from others (yet)...

I'm willing to bet if you change the browser http headers for something more unique (all Tor Browsers identify nearly exactly the same), making you more finger printable, it would let you in faster.

Here you can check how hard to identify you are: https://panopticlick.eff.org/
Perfect privacy means you can be a bot planning to flood the forum with spam. That is the dilemma...

Thanks for taking your time to put out for tips, I have learnt a couple of things from your response that I didn't know about before... am going to try and use those options to avoid some of this endless suffering  ;D

EDIT:
The Panopticlick (https://panopticlick.eff.org/) Tools seems great at least for starters. I did try to test my Brave browser and the results were not bad
https://i.imgur.com/E2CM74g.png