This post is dedicated to Michael :)
I did a quick hack which allows sysops to ban logged-in users. This was
discussed on wikien-l long, long ago, and was widely agreed to be a good
idea (well, not that widely, but Jimbo was particularly keen). Basically you
just type the username into the ban IP box. I changed a few messages to
indicate that you could do it.
Blocking a logged-in user by IP address was slightly trickier (but still
only required a handful of lines). Whenever any banned user successfully
logs on and accesses a page, their IP address is automatically blocked. The
reason given is 'Autoblocked because you share an IP address with "Michael".
Reason: blah blah blah', and the "blocked by" field is copied. That way the
"you are banned discuss this with xxxx" message still makes sense. As usual,
these automatically generated entries, and the original username entries,
can be unblocked by any sysop (even blocked sysops).
I know Michael has been making a nuisance of himself again, so I'm sure a
lot of people will be interested in seeing this go live quickly.
I also fixed that annoying undeletion problem (mostly). It still doesn't
update the search index, or user_newtalk, or site_stats, or probably a few
other things. But at least the link table is fixed up.
-- Tim Starling