Are there problems with the site? I get 404 errors or "connection failed" message, and it's the same on any of the mirrors. Sometimes the captcha doesn't load. Are we being DDOS'd?

>none of the tor ips are banned
He's talking about "dissallow tor posters" options, which prevents posting through the darknet service. Since most of the spam attacks come from the tor version of the site, it makes sense for the BO to disable darknet posting for the duration of the attack.
>more than 40
It might not be necessary if regexes are implemented. The main issues with the existing system is that you have to use a slot for each declension of a word for case and number, otherwise it doesn't work properly in languages with word inflection.
Regexes would also prevent from filtering another word that includes the filtered word, for instance if I wanted to filter "word" but not "sword".
It's not really a priority, but spammers tend to use a set of words that no other poster uses, and replacing those particular words with say colored text helps quickly distinguish spammers from real posters at a glance.