On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 12:21 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 11:27 AM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote: [snip]
Can you suggest anything better that we can do to prevent people from minting as many accounts as they like and causing trouble.
You could require an email address...
Would not have the desired effect. Do you agree or do I need to make a point by mailbombing you from 10,000 email addresses? :)
No system is perfect. You asked for something better.
IPs aren't a perfect proof of work but they are vastly better than
email addresses.
The two aren't mutually exclusive, though.
They are also painless for the user in the common case, unlike email.
So they're fine for the common case. This isn't a common case.
I'm not saying that the ISPs doing this filtering are right, and the WMF relying on IP addresses is wrong. I'm just pointing out that you're both doing nonstandard things, and the two are colliding.
We are allowing people to edit from the UK, you know — they have to
now go through a painful registration process.
I didn't know that, nor do I think it matters. The point is, you (or someone) was trying to put the blame for the blocking of editors solely on the policies of the IWF, and that is completely misleading.
You've hopped on a pointless tangent in any case: We wouldn't have these problems if they blocked the image rather than the text. (Images are served from another IP that doesn't currently go through the censoring filters) They don't claim to want to block the text, if they did there would be more grounds to debate the wisdom of using IPs for anything.
Actually, their policy is to block the image and the page on which it resides. They screwed up on blocking the image, although that could be accidental and caused by another nonstandard practice of Wikipedia - having text pages that end with .jpg.