Account comes up as banned if I use TOR browser?

Post Reply New Topic

Hey all, I just recently installed TOR browser and have been using it regularly. However, earlier I tried to login to WP via the TOR browser and it showed me that my account was banned. OK... sometimes I make controversial posts so I created a new account to use to email an Admin to ask what I had done. Then, I went to login with the new account and I was informed that I was again banned. OK. Thinking that maybe it has something to do with the TOR browser, I logged in with the normal (chrome) browser.. and viola, it works fine. So why can I not log in with the TOR browser? Does WP really need to know where I am??

Web sites usually ban a user's Internet Provide (IP) address. TOR changes your routing path every 15 minutes, meaning that your apparent IP address changes every 15 minutes, too. If one of those addresses was used previouusly by someone who was banned from the same site that you want to use, the site computer will think that you are the same "person" whose IP address was banned. So, to fix this, you can click on the green onion icon in the upper left corner of your TOR browser and select "new identity." This will force the browser window to close and reopen with a new IP address in a couple of seconds. Voila! You are now using a new IP that will probably work at the site (unless it has been banned, too). Also, some web sites permanently ban IP addresses that are know to be used by TOR. In that case, you can set up an account with an IP proxy service other than TOR, but that is more complicated.

By the way, congratulations on your determination to avoid getting tracked, traced and database!

Spot on advice. I got a new identity and now it works fine. I didn't realize you were into TOR, David.

We ban TOR IP addresses on WrongPlanet as a matter of course as they are heavily used by bots, spammers and scammers. I don't advise trying to use the TOR browser on this site for that reason; you will find access very erratic.

Tor was developed by the military, and is being funded by the government, but "the NSA didn't immediately respond to a request for comment."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the ... -trust-it/

Indeed. TOR isn't perfect, but because so many of its nodes are privately owned and operated, it is a lot better than using nothing for online privacy. And, many more private TOR servers are coming online all the time, so privacy and avoiding banned IP addresses should increase.

Let me put it this way. You've got every reason to worry if you're using Tor because you've got something to hide.

Excuse me? I'm actually quite offended by your remark. You don't know me and you know nothing about me. In actuality, I use TOR so that websites cannot target me for ads or watch my every move online. I live a benign life... I have nothing to "hide" and use TOR so that I am not stalked online. It is incredibly presumptuous of you to assume that you know anything about me, based on what my browser is.

I think it?s easy enough: https://www.torproject.org/

The best way to avoid advertising, I find, is to use Adblock https://adblockplus.org/

I've been using it for years and have had very few (if any) problems with it, and haven't seen any ads on the internet since.

If that's the main reason you were using TOR anyway. TOR or going through some other proxy makes everything run so slow, or at least it did for me on my already slow internet lol, and a lot of sites do block access to people going through TOR or other known proxy services. I don't blame people for being concerned about their online privacy with the amount of spying our governments (and corporations) do on their own citizens, whether it's technically legal for them to do so or not.

WP has IPv6 available. Or at least cloudflare.net does.

Does TOR do IPv6 or is it strictly IPv4? If IPv6, it would seem like there are far too many addresses to even think about trying to ban them. After all, if TOR did IPv6, every server could change to an unused IPv6 address as often as they wished and never have to worry about reusing one. From just my allocation, I could allocate nearly eleven thousand IP addresses every second since the Big Bang without reusing any.