Erik Moeller wrote:
Any solution that depends on Jimbo being present is IMHO flawed. Jimbo is usually logged off on the weekends, for example.
I agree with this.
At this point, we're not talking about *policy* per se. Policy on simple vandals very much empowered the sysops to ban the MIT vandal, it's just that a technical limitation made it impossible. The wiki model of trust means that sysops can ban simple vandals without even talking to me about it -- this happens all the time -- but that bans of people who are not *just* simple vandals requires a discussion point.
This is a check on our power (all of us, even me), to prevent the temptation to ban people for political disagreements.
We already have that - IP blocking. We never had a vandal that could switch IPs faster than we could block them. What would be nice is wildcard support at least for the fourth octet.
This would have been helpful this weekend. Obviously, wildcard blocked ips should be restored to use more rapidly than single ips, because they are much more likely to negatively impact legitimate users.
We should also have account creation per IP throttling.
That's a good idea, too, but in this *particular* case it would not have helped. The MIT vandal was hopping ips fairly quickly.
But a fourth octet wildcard would generally knock out an entire computer lab or coffee shop no problem.
--Jimbo