Is that dump going to be maintained under the new regime? While they can't redact existing data bumps due to the license those are covered by, they don't have to keep publishing updates. If that happens then scraping becomes required for the copy-spam sites and such.
Though that is a bit conspiracy-theory-y and I expect blocking Tor is more an issue of a small but very active number of people using it to create accounts to post anonymous spam or abuse. For that, which can be a very real problem, I would suggest a more fine-grained block: stop people from those addresses creating accounts, or posting from relatively new (or recently inactive) accounts, or perhaps somewhere in the middle: prevent connection from Tor addresses posting at all, but still let people use the site. That way you still block the abuse, but have less impact on others accessing via Tor.
I'm a 70K rep contributor to a Stack Exchange site.
StackExchange is composed of contributions from the Internet at large. I've appreciated over the years how StackExchange took this stewardship very seriously without hoarding it behind paywalls - the ethical thing to do.
One of the reasons I was motivated to contribute is because 10-12 years ago, putting tech questions in Google often led to Experts Exchange, a site that takes contributions from the public and makes you pay to see them. (Really need a StackExchange-type site to take on Pinterest now ...)
So ... no, they should not stop publishing updates. People need to bookmark sites and go directly to them instead of relying on an increasingly broken search engine that's past its heyday.
> I'm a 70K rep contributor to a Stack Exchange site.
Well, if we are whopping them out on the table... 75.1K over the three I've used most, and a few thousand over a couple of others. Been around since the start, even got sent free shirts & bits in the early days for being in the top [what-ever-the-cutoff-was] on SF, SO, & DBA.SE.
> So ... no, they should not stop publishing updates.
I wouldn't mind if they stopped providing those dumps, I was just passing on that others suggest that they could (and by rights, they could, but I doubt they will, as my post (I though) said).
As long as the data stays available (just on the main sites is fine by me) under a CC BY-SA I'll keep contributing. They can't revoke the license for existing content, if they change it for future content (for the avoidance of doubt: I have no reason to believe they have any plans to) or the sites otherwise devolve (like others have in the past with rampant tracking and ads) I'll probably bugger off.
https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2015/10/how-to-download-th...