On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 2:58 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
<snip> > > Also....I'm a little unclear about something. If a "Tor-enabled"
account
creates new accounts, will those accounts be able to edit through Tor, too?
The account creation would come from the proxy, so the wiki would have to trust that the proxy is only handing out accounts to users who have been
Sorry about that, meant to hit save instead of send.
What I was going to say is that no, there shouldn't be a way for the "Special Account" to even create child accounts through Tor. We can limit that via OAuth, and we'll also have to trust the proxy to behave correctly. If it looked like the "Special Accounts" were creating child accounts through the proxy, I think that would be a reason to block the proxy.
I think we had different ideas about how the user would edit, which I've addressed below. Happy to clarify if that doesn't make sense.
Sorry Chris, I seem to have been unclear. For the purpose of responding
to this, let's call the account created by the third party the "Special Account". What I wanted to verify was whether or not child accounts created by the Special Account would also be conferred with the privileges of the Special Account (i.e., the ability to edit through Tor) or if they would be treated as any other newly created account. Remember that all autoconfirmed accounts can create child accounts (I believe on enwiki it is throttled to 5 accounts per day, absent special permissions).
To summarize the proposal as I understand it:
- In addition to the existing process for experienced editors to obtain
IPBE, which may vary from project to project, they could also request the creation of a new account, unlinked to their existing accounts, that will have the ability to edit viaTor.
- The community will develop the process for approving which accounts
will have this ability. When granted, the user will be given a token
- The user will take the token to a third party which will create for
them a new account that has the requisite permissions to edit via Tor
- The new, unlinked account will edit Wikipedia in the same manner as a
regular user, subject to the same policies
- There will be a process by which the token can be "broken" or removed
from the account (still to be determined)
I'm actually envisioning that the user would edit through the third party's proxy (via OAuth, linked to the new, "Special Account"), so no special permissions are needed by the "Special Account", and a standard block on that username can prevent them from editing. Additionally, revoking the OAuth token of the proxy itself would stop all editing by this process, so there's a quick way to "pull the plug" if it looks like the edits are predominantly unproductive.
In other words, the difference between the existing process and the proposed process is the addition of the third party and the deliberate separation of the two accounts. (I'm trying to put this into plain language so that it can be explained to a broader audience on a project.)
Do I have this right?
Almost! The accounts are deliberately separated so they can't be linked, like you said. My proposal goes a little further by also restricting what the accounts can do via this third-party proxy. For example, the proxy could run each edit through the abuse filters, or another spam-scoring service, before it even submits the edit, if we want to try and push spam detection further up stream. It could have it's own rate limits, and refuse to service users it feels might be be seen as spammers and could get the whole system shut down.
If the user tries to edit using the "Special Account" directly via Tor (skipping the proxy), Torblock will correctly prevent them from doing anything, just like it currently does.