On 8/9/06, Wildrick Steele wildrick.steele@gmail.com wrote:
Actually not. There weren't any stewards around and the perpetrator remained sysopped for a full day, doing hundreds of random blocks and unblocks. We had to wait for developer intervention to remove the flag in the database. Quite a nonperformance for the otherwise well-functioning steward team. We'll take Wikimania as a good excuse :-)
Wikimania may have been part of the problem. Also, the request at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions#Removal_of_access seems to have been lost amongst the noise of dozens of other requests, which for some reason, no longer get immediately archived, so it's not easy to see whether or not there are outstanding requests. Perhaps moving urgent requests to a separate section at the top would help in future. There is a (not-very-active) IRC channel at #wikimedia-stewards, but the #wikimedia channel is often a better place to find a steward in an emergency. I don't know whether either of these channels were tried before finding a developer.
This might just be a sign that new steward elections are required.
Angela.