On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 4:47 AM, brewhaha%40edmc.net <brewhaha(a)edmc.net>wrote;wrote: Yes, we do have a rule. We also have a rule against vandalism. Hanson does not care for rules. Anonymizer.com is just one proxy. There are thousands of proxies. He also edits through a normal ISP. We can't range block that; it would be impractical. -- Alex (User:Majorly)

The problem is not so much that he edits from a range as much as he abuses proxies. If you don't know, proxies are a way to appear as if you are posting from a different address. So in reality a determined person like grawp can continue to use unblocked proxies until we block them all. ( Blocking *all* proxies is nigh on impossible because computers get comprimised daily... So new "open proxies" are created daily.) In theory as long as grawp has the motivation, he can keep this game up indefinitely, until he is stopped by someone offline (police, parents) or until we have working programs that reliably detect his behavior and undoes it without human assistance. If it were just the one range we would have blocked it long ago, but it is not. On 1/18/09, brewhaha%40edmc.net <brewhaha(a)edmc.net> wrote:

In my experience these kinds of problems need to be dealt with firmly, with a minimum of collateral damage, but in a reactive way that tells the vandal that they can't in general win, in no uncertain terms. Messing around with proxy blocks and filters and stuff- it's much too brittle, it's probably never going to work. I think the easiest and most effective way to handle this GRAWP issue is just to temporarily increase the account age requirement for page moves to (say) 6 months on the wikipedia, and make any account less recent than that go through an admin. If it puts him out of business he'll probably get bored and stop. In a few weeks we could try reducing it again, and if he starts back up, raise it again promptly. The point is, there is no way around that; he can't win. Even if he ages accounts we just raise the requirement, wait a while, and then lower it again. Rinse, lather, repeat. The point is to give them the idea that they're up against an implacable obstacle; which... they are. -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly imperfect world would be much better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GRAWPTHEGIANT07 BTW, since this guy has been confirmed as LtWinters, then my suspicion that he is grawp is also confirmed. I will look for the template for placing that suspicion, because I am not sure that the same people are looking at the same records. I see no reason why a different vandal would use the name of a chased vandal. For that matter, there are three spellings of Psychonaut, and the simple one is still active for some reason. The problem with increasing the account age requirements for moving a page is that it penalizes ALL NEW USERS, not just those with verizon who *might* be personally affected, and only at an inconvenience. There are ways around it and I do not see that Grawp is using them extensively. I see one obvious range on his checkuser page that probably *was* blocked. Verizon is big and no RFC that I know of concerns how IP numbers are allotted. The blocks he has direct access to might concern a district or an entire city. Serious editors with an account on wikipedia are only about one in ten thousand. The advantage to blocking verizon, 64k at a time according to their whois records, is that we might actually get a response from them, saying, yes, he is with us, yes, we do hav a policy problem concerning him, and we are concerning his mother. They hav a policy regarding unwanted communication. All they need is feedback from their own users to get it enforced. I do not really *know* that they ignored previous e-mails from me. I suspect that they might actually pay attention to fifty. "collateral damage" is too strong of a military euphemism for unintended death. Please use "unintended delays" or "requring rudimentarily confirmed channels", because that is all that is entailed. "Ian Woollard" <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote in message news:781c50250901152204q733764aayc1d2758c0201a72f@mail.gmail.com...