On 11/13/05, BJörn Lindqvist bjourne@gmail.com wrote:
Each time an edit is comitted from an unknown IP address a new proxy-to-ip-pair is added to the mapping. MediaWiki could then simply look in the mapping for the proxy which has a certain IP. In the example above, the proxy would be "anon1". And the "userid" field in the row would contain "anon1" instead of "34.19.215.33". Preferably only a few key developers and the MediaWiki software should be allowed access to the proxy-to-IP mapping.
Checkuser would still work, but instead of returning an IP as a result could return "user: [[foobar]], [[barfoo]] and [[anon9512]] shares an IP address." Etc. There are technical solutions.
This would be largely useless. A lot of the time, we're dealing with people on dynamic dialup ranges that change frequently. We use checkuser for more than just identifying that person X and person Y have used the same IP address. One case I looked at yesterday involved a credible allegation of sockpuppetry where the two users had no actual overlapping IPs but were likely (but not convincingly) the same person because, amongst other evidence, I could tell that they used the same ISP and lived in the same city. (Other compelling evidence is that the first editor's edits end before the second's start, with about one hour from last edit of the first to first of the second, that the first editor was banned, and editing time of day patterns for both editors). Your "solution" would have hidden the ISP information from me.
Kelly