On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
Sounds good, but only a sysop could change that status of the page. Or maybe there could be a cookie identifier on each person's computer so we could track them? The cookie would be blockable.
Using cookies to track users would not be as effective as you appear to think it is. Altering cookies is a remarkably trivial exercise, only a little more complicated than changing the wallpaper on your computer screen. (Then again, I used to do phone support for the Netscape browser, so maybe it's only trivial to me.)
Perhaps if the relevant token in the cookie were encrypted -- say along the lines of how the password is encrypted in Linux -- then it would discourage all but the most determined attempts to masquerade as the targetted user. But in any case, it would still be trivial for someone like Lir/Vera/Susan to create a new identity by deleting the token when Wikipedia started blocking him/her based on the token in the cookie.
Geoff