Changes to the Tor Exit List Service

Actually, I think it's more good than bad.

What you have to understand is that most of the access denied pages you encounter actually have nothing to do with Tor. It's not that the site is blocking Tor, it's that the site is ignorant towards Tor. They don't even realize it's a Tor exit node. As a result, traffic coming from that exit node appears to be malicious, due to the volume and traffic patterns and such, so the exit node gets blocked.

By publishing a list of exit nodes, or allowing sites to query if an IP is an exit node, the site can distinguish Tor exit traffic from unusual or malicious traffic. Then, they can whitelist the node, or treat the node differently (e.g. require sign-in before letting you post to a forum) instead of blocking the node outright. In other words, that way they know it's a shared IP. I believe cloudflare does this, as one example.

As previously mentioned, the exit list doesn't really make it any easier for sites to block Tor. Even without any list or any query mechanism, sites would still be able to detect the use of Tor, for example by analyzing traffic patterns (e.g. packet size, circuit lifetime) or by fingerprinting the browser.

"We're not offering anything to websites that want to block Tor that they couldn't do themselves (and from experience, we've seen them do it badly) but we are providing a way to do it without harming the Tor network more than necessary."

I have to agree with the original commenter. I'm aware that there are other ways that websites could block Tor, but the more convenient you make it, the more websites will do so.

In my experience it's very rare for websites to actually 'enhance' things for Tor users, much more common for them to degrade or deny access.

I can see there's a balance in terms of how this affects relay operators/load on the network, but usability has to be a priority! In short, if loads of websites block Tor, the whole project becomes significantly less worthwhile anyway.

"It is not a goal of Tor to provide access to websites that don't want to be accessed"

This bit is downright weird. If websites are going to discriminate against Tor users, are you saying you wouldn't want to do anything to help users bypass that even if you could?