[meowface]

This seems to be following Cloudflare's (and Incapsula's and all the other competitors) approach to bot detection. Basic automatic, silent bot challenges (non-invasive Javascript and DOM tests) which, if failed, give a one-time captcha prompt.

[Scoundreller]

Which has the side-effect of making the site inaccessible to TOR users with JS turned off.

[corobo]

Those people will five 9s likely be blocking ads too, so who cares?

They can enjoy my content for free no problem, but I really don't care what they have to say in regards to how I run things or have things set up.

"Fuck you, pay me" comes to mind

[Houshalter]

The Tor browser doesn't block ads. Just javascript and flash. His point is the internet is becoming increasingly hostile to privacy. It's already extremely difficult if not impossible to create anonymous accounts with tools like Tor. Which discourages things like whistle blowing, or people from areas with oppressive governments.

[corobo]

That is a fair point, in my experience Tor is just used by bots to spam comments up with junk.

This is probably different for larger sites of course but on our scale there's no worries blocking Tor

Edit: Although thinking about it I don't know any ads that aren't served up without some form of Javascript

[Houshalter]

The problem is that every website does the same thing, and now it's impossible to use the internet anonymously. But actual spammers can spend a few bucks on IP rotating services. IP discrimination causes far more harm than good.

Actually I don't think Tor disables javascript by default anymore, but even when I do disable it I still see ads.

[Scoundreller]

If comments were blocked, that's one thing, but increasingly often access to the site as a whole gets blocked.