On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 5:43 PM, Petr Bena benapetr@gmail.com wrote:
I have seen there is a lot of wikis where people are concerned about inactive sysops. They managed to set up a strange rule where sysop rights are removed from inactive users to improve the security. However the sysops are allowed to request the flag to be restored anytime. This doesn't improve security even a bit as long as hacker who would get to some of inactive accounts could just post a request and get the sysop rights just as if they hacked to active user.
Not all wikis blindly give the user their rights back when they do this "theatrical" based security model.
For this reason I think we should create a new extension auto sysop removal, which would remove the flag from all users who didn't login to system for some time,
There is already one that does this from memory (Without checking, E:LandLord)
and if they logged back, the confirmation code would be sent to email, so that they could reactivate the sysop account.
Again, Just theatrical security, Most people tend to use the same passwords everywhere, if this was the case for said Sysop, Their email is also compromised. Also this would require wikis to have email sending setup, as well as the user to have confirmed theirs.
This would be much simpler and it would actually make hacking to sysop accounts much harder.
Not really, per my point above.
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 5:54 PM, Petr Bena benapetr@gmail.com wrote:
More:
IP addresses which do N bad login attemps should be blocked from accessing login page for Z minutes (You have done too many bad login attempts, please wait 5 minutes before trying again) This would help to avoid bots who try to compromise account by trying random passwords
We already do this, I believe.
The target user should be notified according to their personal config (They could specify if they want to be warned if someone is about to compromise their account or not)
Pointless user prefernce IMHO, we should just send them (for wikis that have email setup) and probably inculde a note along the lines of "You should consider making sure your password is secure, some handy hints are…"
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 6:16 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
There's no point in making technical solutions for problems which are imaginary in the first place, just as you say. The English Wikipedia community rejects the notion that sysop inactivity is a problem quite firmly, and it does just fine. Meta, Commons, my home Hebrew Wikipedia and some other projects do have such rules, and they are completely pointless.
En.Wiki does de-Sysop inactivtive accounts now.