Angela wrote:
It is the IP of a user whose user name is blocked. For example, if you block "User:Angela", my IP is also blocked, but for privacy reasons, that is shown as #number, rather than displaying my actual IP.
This IP block happens automatically as soon as a user blocked by name tries to access the site. If I dialled up with a different IP and tried to log in as Angela, that IP would be auto-blocked as well, showing up in the block log as #1234 and I would see a message telling me I was autoblocked because I share an IP with Angela.
It is possible to unblock one but not the other.
Angela.
--- Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote: > On Special:ipblocklist, I see three basic types of
entries. I only understand two of them.
First, there's the ip block, for example: 'Joe Sysop blocked 123.123.123.123'
Second, there's the username block: 'Jane Sysop blocked ReallyOffensiveName'
Third, there's these: 'Joe Sysob blocked #1521'
What are those? There's no link to the contribs, so it's impossible to see what they are. The number appears to be the number of the block, not an identifier of what was blocked.
The original behaviour of the feature was to block both the user's name and IP address. Allan Crossman pointed out in this message:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-September/005857.html
that this feature could be used by sysops to quietly gain the IP address of any user, by blocking them briefly then unblocking them before they made an edit. To address this, I added the "ipb_auto" field to the block table, which is set for any automatically generated row. On automatically generated rows, the primary key is shown instead of the IP address.
-- Tim Starling