Erik Moeller wrote:

If we set a cookie in the browsers of all Wikipedia visitors, anonymous or not, we could the assign them random global user IDs. Instead of banning users by IP, we could ban them by GUID, which would eliminate the risk of accidentally banning legitimate contributors.

While the majority of users have cookies enabled, a minority does not, so "soft bans" as I like to call them would not work for them. Other users might be smart enough to turn cookies off to avoid the ban. But I consider both beyond the technical understanding of most vandals, so I think soft bans might be quite efficient.

What do you think?

I don't think that this is particularly *soft*, just less error prone that banning by IP. That is, it's less prone to errors of one type (banning the innocent) and more prone to errors of the other type (not banning the guilty).

Will it work? We could test the situation by giving anonymous users such cookies and seeing how often the same IP comes back without the same cookie. Then we could try to determine if any of these cases are the same person. If not, or if rarely, then this method will have a good chance of working, on the technically unsavvy.

-- Toby