[WikiEN-l] Should we block unregistered AOL users? (was: [Wikitech-l] User block changes)

[Death Phoenix]

On 7/11/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
>
> As some of you may have noted, we now have a couple of new options to
> choose when blocking users.  Tim Starling, who implemented the feature,
> posted the following clarification on the wikitech-l list:
>
> Tim Starling wrote:
> <snip>
> >
> > This holds regardless of the anon-only option. This means that anon-only
> > range blocks or IP blocks can be used to mitigate the effects of
> autoblocks
> > on shared IP addresses, because an anon-only block will allow logged in
> > users to edit regardless of the presence of a matching autoblock. This
> has a
> > potential to be counterintuitive -- unblocking someone's IP can in fact
> > cause them to be blocked. But I thought it was better than the other
> solutions.
>
> Given the above, would it now be advisable to block the entire AOL proxy
>   pool from editing by unregistered users?  This would have the side
> effect that AOL users would no longer be hit by random autoblocks.
>

My initial opinion on this would be to do so. It would be great if we could
replace the entire advice section of [[Wikipedia:Advice to AOL users]] with
"Register an account" and no longer have to deal with the headaches of AOL
vandalism affecting valid users.