As some of you may have noted, we now have a couple of new options to
choose when blocking users. Tim Starling, who implemented the feature,
posted the following clarification on the wikitech-l list:
Tim Starling wrote:
<snip>
This holds regardless of the anon-only option. This means that anon-only
range blocks or IP blocks can be used to mitigate the effects of
autoblocks
on shared IP addresses, because an anon-only
block will allow logged in
users to edit regardless of the presence of a matching autoblock. This
has a
potential to be counterintuitive -- unblocking
someone's IP can in fact
cause them to be blocked. But I thought it was better than the other
solutions.
Given the above, would it now be advisable to block the entire AOL proxy
pool from editing by unregistered users? This would have the side
effect that AOL users would no longer be hit by random autoblocks.
My initial opinion on this would be to do so. It would be great if we could
replace the entire advice section of [[Wikipedia:Advice to AOL users]] with
"Register an account" and no longer have to deal with the headaches of AOL
vandalism affecting valid users.