First off, I want to thank xes and everyone else who puts in their free time to keep TMO running.

I don't want this to sound like a complaint but I do think it's unacceptable that a site like TMO is blocking Tor access. This is not your average internet community. Many TMO users hold freedom and privacy values in high regard. Blocking Tor exit node IP addresses completely disregards these two values. Whilst it might be reducing spam and other attacks, it is potentially blocking legitimate new users who may have otherwise made a valuable contribution to our community if they could only access this site.

I'm not totally convinced that TMO spam is manually posted by humans. These days I don't tend to open spam threads but the ones that I have seen here could have easily been posted by a bot.

Most of the spam that I have seen here contains a hyperlink in the first post from the spam account. One anti-spam measure which has been suggested before (but not in this thread) would be to block posts containing links from new users until a minimum age/post/thank limit has been reached.

CAPTCHA solutions have been known to help but it's already been stated how they are an annoyance to legitimate users. A good compromise might be to only challenge users with CAPTCHA if they are accessing the site from a Tor IP address. This is actually quite a common practice that some CDNs use on Tor users.

I'm not saying that xes should be the one to implement all of this. I think this should probably go to the council to discuss a way forward.