Daniel- This might mean all of AOL. I don't think that's an acceptable option. But if you beg me a little, I'll hack our IP blocking code to - make IP blocks auto-expire after a while (unless no limit is set), so that we can use them more effectively - allow sysops to ban newly created accounts for the first 4 weeks or so and retrieve the IP address under which they were created. That should make it easier to get rid of new Michael incarnations as they appear, and to keep track of the IP addresses he uses. Regards, Erik

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote: It's past time that we contact AOL about Michael. I'd do it, but I doubt signing myself ``Geoff Burling, Wikipedia contributor" would provide much clout: if one of the sysops or developers could tackle this, I'd be much obligied. And if they forward all complaints about Michael to /dev/null (for the non-techies, that means, roughly, that they delete our email before reading), we should ask Jimbo to make an attempt to approach them either via email or through commercial connections. (I'd assume that one of Boomis' salespeople must know a salesperson at AOL who can refer us to the right person.) And if we are forced to block AOL's block of IP addresses, I'd suggest that we make the decision as public as possible: posting to any relevant Usenet groups, web news sites like Slashdot, & The Observer, etc. And give AOL enough lead time to deal with Michael first -- even if they only deal with this due to bad publicity. But all of my talk ``let's do that if this doesn't work" is just so many recycled electrons unless we make an attempt to approach AOL about one of their users violating their Terms Of Service; unless AOL is truly interested in confirming their reputation as the toilet of the Internet, it might take only one email from us for AOL to drop the boom on this jerk. Geoff