Erik Moeller wrote:
If we set a cookie in the browsers of all Wikipedia
visitors, anonymous or
not, we could the assign them random global user IDs. Instead of banning users
by IP, we could ban them by GUID, which would eliminate the risk of
accidentally banning legitimate contributors.
While the majority of users have cookies enabled, a
minority does not, so
"soft bans" as I like to call them would not work for them. Other users might
be smart enough to turn cookies off to avoid the ban. But I consider both
beyond the technical understanding of most vandals, so I think soft bans might
be quite efficient.
What do you think?
I don't think that this is particularly *soft*,
just less error prone that banning by IP.
That is, it's less prone to errors of one type (banning the innocent)
and more prone to errors of the other type (not banning the guilty).
Will it work?
We could test the situation by giving anonymous users such cookies
and seeing how often the same IP comes back without the same cookie.
Then we could try to determine if any of these cases are the same person.
If not, or if rarely, then this method will have a good chance of working,
on the technically unsavvy.
-- Toby