On Sat, 2004-02-14 at 21:07, Charles Podles wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
207.44.154.35 is the popular anonymous proxy http://www.anonymization.net,
and as such is used by lots of different vandals. Anonymous proxies are regularly used for vandalism, and once we block one, the vandal just moves to another one. On meta recently we've had a bot operating to vandalise tens of articles, via an anonymous proxy.
Would there be any objections to systematically blocking all anonymous proxies on a site-wide basis?
Are there any *valid* uses for anonymizing proxies, or are they used only to vandalize, troll, and dodge hard bans? Can anyone think of a situation in which someone might have a legitimate purpose for such a tool? Since I can't, I wouldn't object to a permanent block of any and all anonymous proxy services.
--Charles Podles (en:User:Mirv)
At the absolute least, people using an anonymous proxy should get a read-only version of the Wikipedia with a notice saying that they're missing the full functionality through using their proxy. Perhaps they could also edit talk pages, although those can also be abused.