On Friday, July 11, 2014, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This is one of those perennial proposals that never
quite seems to take
off; I can remember having some version of this discussion back in 2008,
and I know that some of our earliest edits show a partially obscured IP
address, not the whole thing. It might require Brion or Tim or someone else
of that length of experience to explain the original thinking.
As I recall, UseModWiki (the perl-based wiki software we used before
switching to a custom solution which evolved into MediaWiki) obscured the
last octet of the IP address, which still left you with enough information
in most cases to track down an ISP or school/business/govt institution. I
think UseMod also exposed the IP addresses of logged-in users, but the way
logins worked were very different and it was possible to set your name to
someone else's name or some such oddities...
I'm not sure offhand if there was explicit discussion of switching to not
obscuring the last octet in the PHP software/nascent MediaWiki... But this
was back in 2001 when the internet was a little younger and everybody was
spewing their IP addresses all over their email and newsgroup posts too.
Folks are a lot more paranoid about that today.
In general I favor migrating away from publicly exposing IP addresses, but
not sure to what exactly would be best... I kinda like the idea of an
anonymous-but-consistent "proto-account" that can be transformed into a
named login if desired, but it needs to be thought out in more detail to
resolve potential difficulties.
-- brion