On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 1:21 AM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 9:20 AM, Gregory Maxwell
<gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I only asked why we give the equivalent checkuser
on half our users to
the general public. So far only Anthony has provided a reasonable
explanation.
There is a much more obvious answer: nobody has written the code to do
otherwise. An IP is a fixed size which helps with storage, and the
properties of IP numbering and re-use are well-known, allowing people
to roughly guess when it is a different person on the same IP.
That pretty much *is* my answer. Although, I think the main reason
nobody has written the code is that no one has been provided with a
spec which has any reasonable chance of being implemented. Change
don't happen much 'round here.
Rather than adding a layer on top of IP to hide the
IP, it would be
less revealing to automatically assign each new IP session with a
cookie managed identifier, i.e. "Guest1234" (or a long random string
that does not repeat, such as a GUID ) and then allow the user to
rename this "guest account" when they finally learn how to.
Along those lines, I wonder how many people would be scared away from
editing if the "edit" link took them to the account creation page.
It'd be worth trying "as an experiment", if there were any mechanism
to actually perform such experiments.
On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 3:02 PM, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
We could easily implement it so that
administrators automatically see IPs or can convert in one step, meaning
issues of tracking and dealing with vandalism wouldn't apply.
I'm pretty sure if that were done one of the admins would leak a full
table of IP to hash matchups. It'd only take one admin to send such a
table to Wikitruth or something and the whole hashing scheme would be
fairly useless. Counterproductive, even, because it'd provide a false
sense of security.
On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 2:12 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Ah... Forget it. We won't come to an
understanding. ... At least I tried.
I quote Florence when I say, "Nod."