On 4/11/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Stephen makes some important observations but what I'm worried about is that recognizing vandalism from registered accounts is a lot harder. We don't have vandal tools that filter out anon edits for nothing.
That's a good point too. Think also of the advantage of having IP information for drive-by IP vandals. We can easily find out if the vandal is coming from a school, or a large proxy, or so on, and modify our strategy accordingly (eg, imposition of range blocks where appropriate, or shorter durations to minimise collateral damage).
My own worry is the not-so-obvious vandalism, and that's why I emphasised "obvious" in my preceding post. I'm not aware of any stats on this, but I would wager that the more complex the vandalism, the more likely it is to be performed by a registered account.