On 3/20/06, Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com> wrote:
[on wikipedia-l]
The real situation is that our current blocking system sucks. A lot. And if we
just "flipped a switch" it would suck *MUCH WORSE* because it would be
virtually
impossible to actually block anyone -- just create a bunch of accounts and
you're immune until someone laboriously tracks them all down.
So, it'll take more options and rethinking and generally some better, clearer
idea of what blocking's supposed to do.
Here's one proposal. Please comment.
In any case, we leave in place the option to block an IP entirely.
Whatever other, softer notion of blocking we introduce is
just another option, to be used as a first choice but with
hard blocking available as always if necessary.
A first cut at "soft blocking" is to block anon edits
but permit logged-in users to edit. As you say,
the trouble is that vandals can make accounts too.
There are two ways to make an account: by hand
or with a bot. So we can say that to edit from a
soft-blocked IP, you must have two "real user" bits set:
- you've confirmed an email address
- you've passed a captcha[1]
The captcha makes it very difficult for a bot
to make accounts that can edit from behind a soft-block.
The email confirmation makes it take a couple of minutes
to make each account by hand.
If necessary we can add a couple more provisos:
- the same email address can't be used to confirm many accounts
(or many accounts that can edit from behind a soft-block)
- if the IP is from AOL and it's soft-blocked, the confirmed email
must be an AOL address. Since these cost money,
this proviso and the last one together limit the number of accounts
any AOL user can edit with when AOL is soft-blocked.
One could imagine generalizing this to other ISPs --
the hard part is cataloguing the IP range <-> email domain mapping --
but even a special case for AOL would be valuable.
None of this need affect people who just want to make an account,
to read logged in, or set their preferences; the only thing
an account that hasn't met the conditions need be barred
from doing through a soft-block is editing.
I see that Christian Siefkes has partially implemented
a similar proposal (comment 50):
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=550
so the task is to finish it and give it whatever specific behavior
is deemed most useful.
I have some time and could implement this feature
if there's consensus we should have it.
Greg
(User:Gnp)
[1] Of course for the sake of people who can't see the captcha
we allow people to contact a human and ask for this bit to be set.