On Saturday 08 February 2003 12:35 pm, Jimmy Wales wrote:
It sometimes happens that true vandals login. I give as an example Annetit on the [[Woman]] article. If this person was posting from an ip number, instead of a username, they would have been promptly and justly banned immediately.
It would be nice if sysops could just as easily obtain and ban the ip number for a username.
There *are* some potential political problems with this, obviously. One of the most important "checks" against sysop "power" is that by logging in, people are immune to banning unless we go through a whole political process of deciding to ban them, which is always a big deal.
And that's a good thing, I think, as uncomfortable as it is sometimes.
So, ideas?
--Jimbo
After I spent at least 4 hours fighting this clown when I should have been sleeping you already know where my opinion resides on the issue of whether or not to allow Admins to block the IPs of logged-in vandals (thanks for doing the blocking BTW - I /really/ needed some sleep by that point). It would be nice, if easy to implement, for an Admin to be able to block the IP a logged-in user is using without exposing their IP to the Admin.
This would prevent an Admin from doing preemptive blocks of IP ranges but some users might not be comfortable with exposing their IP - even if it is only to Admins. A wealth of information can be obtained on a person once you have their IP and even though I trust that this information would not be abused by the Admins I know of several people on the en.wiki who would make more of this than it really is.
So the blocked user page could say:
14:02 Feb 8, 2003, [[SeanAvery941]] blocked 'IP1_used_by_User:Annetit' ([[contribs]]) ([[unblock]]) (Vandalized a series of pages by reverting to earlier versions. Annetit did not stop after being asked to do so and then did not stop after being warned)
Developers, of course, would still be able to see the actual IP so that the person's ISP can be notified if needed. Developers would also be the only ones with the ability to actually ban a /user name/ from being used at any IP.
But of course, blocking the IP of a logged-in user needs at least a good mention on the mailing list. Perhaps whenever /any ban/ is enacted a message indicating the IP/ user name banned, the Admin doing the banning and the stated reason why the ban was implemented would be sent to either the corresponding language-specific mailing list (wikinl-l, wikifr-l, wikipl-l, wikien-l, wikieo-l, intlwiki-l - for languages without their own mailing list) or all ban notifications go to wikipedia-l (probably the best option in terms of accountability).
That would be another check on Admin power especially since it creates a permanent record of bans in a forum that can debate the merits of the ban.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
WikiKarma: I was up all night helping to clean-up after the MIT Vandal.