Haloscan comment censorship - "Sorry, Tor users are not allowed to post due to abuse" - even if you are not actually using Tor !
We tried to post a comment to a .blogspot hosted blog which uses the third party blog Comments and Trackback system Haloscan.
However, despite allowing us to Preview the comment, once we tried to Publish it, then we got:
"Sorry, Tor users are not allowed to post due to abuse"
We were not actually using Tor at the time !
Surely Haloscan cannot be so stupid as to be censoring and blocking Tor exit nodes by IP address allocation block, thereby affecting all the other "innocent" users of an Internet Service Provider, can they ?
If you want to check to see if Haloscan is blocking your ISP, with or without Tor, feel free to try to post comments to http://spybloguk.blogspot.com/
Comments
As the author of the blog Haloscan blocked the comments from, I'm embarrassed, especially since blunt software filters obstruct my blog, my emails containing a signature including my blog url and my comments to other blogs, all too often. I've written to Haloscan requesting they stop blocking Tor users and asking for an explanation of exactly what happened.
You may remember that in 1999 a big US ISP decided to block all traffic from the UK, after they suspected that porn spam was being sent from a UK university. They didn't even warn the university first that their server might have been compromised. Filtering Tor users or via IP address allocation block, may not affect as many people as shutting off the entire country but in principle it is an equivalent disproportionate response.
Posted by: Ray | November 22, 2006 10:34 AM
@ Ray - as we have shown, with spybloguk.blogspot.com it seems to be a general Haloscan problem, not just restricted to your blog.
Effectively it is your blog which is being censored by Haloscan, for no good reason. All Tor users, and even non-Tor users, are being tarred with the same brush of "abuse".
This is intolerable from a civil liberties and free speech viewpoint.
Just like WebSense censoring Spy Blog for no good reason, and your own with various problems with censorware companies, this is tantamount to libel.
It is also commercial suicide, from a Haloscan paid advertiser viewpoint.
If Halsoscan want to block Tor exit nodes, well, that is up to them.
There is no excuse whatsoever for blocking blog commentators who are not actually using Tor to make a blog comment post !
We too have also emailed Haloscsn about this issue, nut they have not yet bothered to reply.
If anyone comes across this comment thread via a search engine, then we would seriously ask you to reconsider any idea of using Halsocan for you own blog.
Posted by: wtwu | November 22, 2006 11:24 PM
This might be of interest, and is somewhat related. I recently posted a comment on an entry on my own wordpress blog which included a link to the Tor website. The Akismet spam filter blocked the message. You can see the (now unblocked) message at this address:
http://thesamovar.wordpress.com/2006/11/17/keeping-your-knife-sharp/#comment-206
Posted by: Dan Goodman | November 24, 2006 5:48 PM
Incredibly, we have just posted two Haloscan comments, using two different Tor exit nodes, which have been published ok on spybloguk.blogspot.com
We are still being blocked from posting, either directly from our IP address, or through our ISP's proxy servers, when we are not using Tor !
Posted by: wtwu | November 29, 2006 3:35 PM