Ray Saintonge wrote: If communities are going to insist that a steward desysop himself every time he goes into a project to perform routine anti-vandalism it's easy to see that it is more objectionable that they perform acts automatically without ever logging themselves in. Perhaps it would be preferable that once a steward has properly given himself sysop rights he retain those rights unless there is a specific objection from the community. That would be far more acceptable than any kind of automated process.
I'd be fine with that too, but it's really a moot point. This still requires a steward (or team of them) to go to each wiki individually to make the blocks - hardly the most efficient method. This proposed mechanism would simply automate the process, saving time and manpower. When dealing with a large number of spambots, or a persistent cross-wiki vandal [1], manpower is often a prime concern. Can we also try to remember that, as with the change pagemove upon autoconfirmed, we're talking mainly about wikis with a community not able to effectively fend off the spammers etc. I wrote [2] at the time that Heller would be proud of the requests to have wikis with no community ask to opt-in for such a measure; I think the same thing needs to be said here. Mike.lifeguard
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Drini/daylog&oldid=8618... [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Metapub&diff=prev&oldid=...