So I have this site for my fanzine and the index has a chatbox.
A nazi showed up and sent a hateful message. I didn't engage because he wants attention, I just deleted it so it wouldn't bother other visitors - but of course I checked his IP before deleting, because if it was from some telecom then he was probably on his cellphone and blocking the IP would work to keep him away for some time, but the IP was from a Tor exit node.
Next day, another hateful message, another Tor IP. I want to keep my chat open and welcoming, for everyone, but I'm also not paying for a server, and free services have very limited moderation options, so how could I prevent this idiot from bothering people in my site?
I found the iplogs API that checks if user accessing the site is using Tor, VPN, a known proxy, or a suspicious IP, so I made a script that if that's the case, then the chat won't load. This anti-privacy measure made me really sad though, even though Tor and VPNs are barely known/used in my country (our ISPs don't rat us for piracy) and it wouldn't affect the absolute majority of people visiting my site (common local folks, from my city), it still sucks that some real users could be locked out of the chat, despite the slim chance, and another problem is that if he was blocking scripts then the chat would load anyway, so I decided to put the chat in the script itself... but still, it's a static site, if the guy got suspicious, like he opened the site on his cellphone or another browser on desktop and saw the chat and then opened again on Tor and it wasn't there, he could inspect the page, see scripts running, check the code and find the chat there, so then I decided to create a fake chatbox, my honeypot, the script now checks the IP, if it's a "clean" one, the person goes to the regular chat with everyone, if it's Tor/VPN/proxy it goes to the honeypot. To make the honeypot even more convincing I copied all the messages from the original chat to it, so he will be seeing the same thing accessing from a regular browser and from Tor, the only hint that this is not the same chatbox is the missing time stamps.
So next day, the nazi commented on the limbo, a room of shadows of real users, but that his antics wouldn't bother anyone around, for no one can perceive his existence.
I deleted the message anyway, because a real user might end up in there - and if they leave a message I will re-post on the real chat.
Another thing, I'm certain the nazi is from my city, he didn't find my zine site on search engines, he either picked one of the zines somewhere or saw some paste-ups about the zine with its internet address. I also asked around, and it seems like only one neighborhood has nazi symbols spray painted, might not be the same guy, but this one doesn't go very far from home, and I know where I gonna be wheatpasting next.
Some pictures of zines and paste-ups here: https://pirahxcx.neocities.org/journal#punk (not mobile friendly)
You've rediscovered shadow banning. User thinks he's logged in and annoying people. But he isn't really. Search for shadow banning or shadowbanning for other methods.
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