I have some success with Lancaster University. I originally slapped one of their proxies with a 6 month AO block due to persistent, long term vandalism, but one of the sysadmins contacted me and told me they have XFF headers. After some fruitful discussion/negotiation, I removed the block and put up a header on the talk pages for their four proxies asking anyone who blocks the IP (or issues a warning) to also send an email to their abuse email, or to ask me to send and email. FYI, I have links to the four proxies at [[User talk:Deathphoenix/Lancaster]] (the IP talk page header is at [[User:Deathphoenix/Lancaster]]).
Lancaster's IT department has been quite good at identifying vandals and forwarding the cases to their internal departments. Quite a number of student-vandals have had stern talking-tos from the head of their User Services department, and they have all been quite repentant once they realise that they are NOT anonymous.
My suggestions for the school network admins and staff would be:
1. Implement XFF headers and make sure students have to log in using a unique user ID (easiest would be based on student number) before using school computers. 2. Have an easy-to-contact abuse email address that we can slap on the IP talk page, asking people to forward vandalism diffs. 3. Act promptly to reports sent to the abuse email address and (optionally) let the abuse reporter know when the vandal is identified and if any action has been taken.
Cheers,
DP
On 5/1/07, Aude audevivere@gmail.com wrote:
Does anyone have experience contacting schools regarding vandalism and can offer advice/best practices?
I had to block one of the schools one of the jurisdictions where I attended school, and comfortable contacting them. They can possibly track down which student did the latest vandalism, but not really sure what the school can do to stop them. I only speculate that it's a relatively small number of other kids responsible for previous incidents of vandalism from the school. Does that sound reasonable?
The majority of edits from the school IP are not constructive, but some are constructive. The volume of vandalism is moderate, but manageable (on our end) and not high as I've seen with other schools. And have no idea how many students and staff there edit with accounts. I prefer not simply blocking the whole school because of some bad kids.
What other things can the school network administrator and staff do? Any suggestions?
--Aude _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l