Ben Yates wrote: Some of the worst vandalbots create accounts. Still, your point is absolutely valid in the broader sense. What changes could be make that might allow us to mitigate the problems of anonymous proxies in a gentler way than wholesale blocking? Keep in mind that ideas are essentially useless, at least as compared to simple running code. So those of us who want to get something done in this area have a responsibility to either code it, or make sure that our great heroes the programmers understand that their humble subjects would be overjoyed to see something good in this area. :-) --Jimbo

On 10/26/05, Alphax <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think he's less concerned with anonymity than he is about getting around the Great Firewall and being able to edit Wikipedia. If he's worried about prosecution, well, that's his own fear and he should be aware of what is or what is not legally/technically possible. Anyway, that's an issue for Tor and him to worry about, not us. There are a host of reasonably simple technological solutions which could mitigate most of this (i.e. allowing users with reasonable edit histories to edit from tor accounts) but as Jimbo said all of that means very little unless we sit down and hack out the code for it. On 10/26/05, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: I took a look at it briefly and it seemed to be 80% of the people saying, "This might be a good option to have in some circumstances" and another 20% saying "I dunno, vandals might be able to still abuse it!" Personally, I think it looks like an instance of the perfect trumping the good. If the code is there to do the "block certain IPs from allowing anon edits but not from account creation" trick, why not just turn it on? If all hell breaks loose we can turn it off again. We don't have to get it perfect on the first try, do we? Whatever happens, the experience would definitely inform future discussion and speculation about these sorts of things. FF