On Tuesday 10 September 2002 05:28 pm, LDC wrote:
Why not just put a link to that user's contributions page on your user page?
Devil's advocate (that is, don't take me too seriously): Then why do we have watch lists? We can simply put links to the articles we want to watch on our user page. I'm currently watching a couple hundred pages so in order to see what has been happening with those articles when I was away from Wikipedia I would have to spend at least a couple of hours opening each page and looking at its history each day (either that or look through thousands of edits on Recent Changes). End Devil's advocate.
The whole point of my original idea was to quickly move many IPs off the IP blocked list. In order to do this with a minimum amount of risk, some type of "watch IP" functionality would be needed. Therefore if I temporarily block an IP for posting vulgarities on several pages I would like to know when this IP makes another edit after the block is lifted. This would be a type of probation (liftable any time by any sysop).
My original idea was to have a separate Recent Changes of edits made my all IPs on probation but simply having their IP bolded in the regular Recent Changes would be a good idea too.
The reason I have not posted this to SorceForge is because this is a policy-level feature request and needs to be discussed before it is even considered for implementation.
The idea of having a general "watch user" function was not part of my original idea (but should be easy to implement if the IP probation idea is implemented). I don't know how useful general "watch user" function would be, however. If the two functions lived side-by-side then it might be confusing to differentiate between those IPs on probation and those users you simply are interested in tracking. Different colors would work I guess; bolded red (or other warning color) for IPs on probation (this would be viewable to at least every logged-in user) and simply bold for those on your personal 'watch user' list (which is unique to your own settings).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)