Timwi wrote: Cough ..... There are wikimedians whose provider forces them behind an open proxy and who do not have the financial means to change provider. Me Waerth/Walter

Walter van Kalken wrote: What are these providers? I'm sure Wikimedia can exert some pressure to get them to make the proxies less open.

On 6/4/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: This cuts both ways. Mindspillage and I edit from a roadrunner cable modem a lot of the time, and a few months ago we received an IP listed in one of the openproxy lists. This kept me from logging into a couple of IRC networks from home, but it wasn't a huge inconvenience to me because I could just ssh into something elsewhere on the internet. It had been listed almost a year before we'd received the address, and of course we are not running an open proxy. The requirement from the open proxy list to be delisted was for someone authoritative for the netblock to contact them, so they ignored all contact from me. Even after I ran into an engineer from my upstream at NANOG I was unable to get them to send a darn email. ... Eventually we got a new IP and the problem was gone. Had we been joe random, unable to just come from another IP, and had wikipedia been using that open relay list you very likely would have lost a contributor. I think we must ultimately accept that blocking can not exclude someone from our community, and that is it not desirable to use it as a punitive measure, and only somewhat effective as a technical measure. Jumping through huge hoops to close every loophole will, ultimately, be as futile as a vandal trying to keep his bad edits in... and likely to cause lots of harm to others.

Jimmy Wales wrote: Then make them care. Hack something into MediaWiki that allows us to display a pre-set message to non-logged-in users with certain IPs or within certain IP ranges. Use that to encourage users who are forced behind an open proxy to switch provider, implicitly mumbling something about their management. Keep telling the providers that we're actively doing this to their users. When they start losing customers, they will start caring. Timwi

On 04/06/05, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM POSSIT MATERIARI ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE

On 6/4/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com> wrote: Agreed, but we should acknowledge the risks brought on by our haste by using temporary blocks, and demonstrate our attempts at fairness and good faith by leaving a note on the talk page. For users which we don't expect to change between many addresses we could do longish blocks, say 6months. For users who can obviously change among many IPs, we should short blocks, ideally no longer than 48 hours.

Like in my case. Switching provider would cost me my combinationcontract through which I get mobele phone, landline and internet combined with a good discount. I wouldn't be able to pay for all 3 if I had to pay seperate. There are more people like me in that situation Waerth/Walter *disclaimer* Sorry for bringing it up time and time and time again.

Huh who me ......... ;) Anyway, related question: anyone has a reliable SMTP server that actually sends all your mail out instead of missing 10 - 20% ??? Waerth / Walter van Kalken in Bangkok, Thailand

Walter van Kalken wrote: If you're really desparate, can't you install one of your own?

Phil Boswell (phil.boswell(a)gmail.com) [050525 23:02]: http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=550 Everyone thinks it's a good idea - get coding! - d.

"Brion Vibber" wrote in message news:4294D865.4050108@pobox.com... Not exactly: it would transform the problem of an anonymous user hitting-and-running through what I presume would be a series of IP addresses into the different problem of a logged-in user who can be blocked individually. OK, so they could create a whole load of them, but in the meantime the well-behaved users using that range of IP addresses would still be able to gain access to the wiki. And the process of detecting sock-puppets and blocking them is well-known...a pain-in-the-fundament but well-known. Maybe there could be some sort of alarm when a new account is created through an IP address known to be a problem? Is there a log of new accounts? Is it possible for someone **somewhere** to note which IP address was used to create an account? SideNote: I just looked at [[en:Special:Listusers]]. The first 15 entries have names which the wiki apparently can't parse since they just show as "User:" with no linking. From there up to #225 the names begin with punctuation and several are IMNSHO clear candidates for WP:RFC (I'm not alone, the first one I checked has been blocked :-). Are there tools for clearing this sort of thing up? Also, this page would be more useful if it listed, for example, first edit and most recent edit...possibly "blocked" status also. Are these data which would be available if someone yelled "write it yourself" at me? -- Phil [[en:User:Phil Boswell]] PS: Brion, how are you reading this stuff? Your messages always appear in OE as attachments :-(