mikelifeguard@fastmail.fm wrote:
From: Birgitte SB [mailto:birgitte_sb@yahoo.com]
Frankly how to handle these anticipated problems _should_ have been decided in concert with the decision to implement of this feature. I had thought they had been. Obvoiusly the feature was rolled out without addressing the concerns that people expressed over this during the intial discussion of such a feature. That should not have happened but here we are.
That's actually false - the discussion regarding global blocking addressed these concerns explicitly and extensively, as you can well see for yourself: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Global_blocking and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Global_blocking/Archive_1
Ipblock-exempt and a local whitelist on the IP are both options you are free to use to help legitimate users caught in global blocks.
Those are talk pages, and the fact that there had to be an archive is clear evidence that the discussion was a lengthy one. But wading through endless talk pages is no way to find an answer to an immediate problem.
Documentation for how to deal with the kinds of problems that Birgitte has encountered should be easily available on each site. The Village Pump is probably not the best place since that is mostly for current discussions, and it will not be easily found after the notice has been archived. To expect non-technical people to resort to Bugzilla is expecting too much.
Ec