On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 12:21 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 11:27 AM, Anthony
<wikimail(a)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.