On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, Jason Williams wrote: Hmm. The existence of this account would seem to make banning people impossible, since anyone could sign in under this name and make edits. However, I suspect that the intention of whoever made the account was to enable people to make truly anonymous edits. Simply not signing in at all would probably allow one to do this for a while, but people might eventually spot the pattern in one's edits and work out which IP address corresonds to which user. I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of anonymous edits myself, because of the difficulty in contacting contributors to check things with them. However, if there is a consensus that anonymous edits are a good idea, there could perhaps be a new check box on the "Edting" page, saying, "Make this edit anonymous". I'm not necessarily recommending this, but I suppose it might come in useful if someone wants to make a valid contribution which they nevertheless would rather not be associated with. Oliver +-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+

On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 08:42:03AM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote: Because with it, anonymous users no longer have their IP address visible (and can't be banned by non-deities). If that's what is wanted, then that is what the policy should be, and the software modified accordingly. -- jason(a)jasonandali.org.uk http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/

Ray Saintonge wrote: It is a little weird, but we can easily adjust to it. If someone starts using that account to do naughty things, we will just ban the account. If someone keeps doing this, we'll have to deal with it when it comes up. Historically speaking, we haven't had a lot of trouble with people trying to subvert the system. --Jimbo