At 2002-11-10 20:56 +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
If we set a cookie in the browsers of all Wikipedia visitors, anonymous or not, we could the assign them random global user IDs. Instead of banning users by IP, we could ban them by GUID, which would eliminate the risk of accidentally banning legitimate contributors.
While the majority of users have cookies enabled, a minority does not, so "soft bans" as I like to call them would not work for them. Other users might be smart enough to turn cookies off to avoid the ban. But I consider both beyond the technical understanding of most vandals, so I think soft bans might be quite efficient.
What do you think?
Sounds like an idea worth considering.
Some other suggestions: Ban a whole range of IP-addresses, except for people that did behave in the past. You could for example give out (coded) successive cookies for each range of 256*256 IP addresses. Whenever someone misbehaves in that range, you ban the whole range, except the people with a cookie with a lower number. Because the numbers are coded it's hard to guess a coded number that represents a lower number.
Another idea is to ban not only based on the IP-address-range but also on the kind of browser and OS etc. This means that everybody in the whole range would be banned unless they use another browser/version or OS.
Another method could be to notify all former users in the range by email and ask them to contact a supervisor if they want to use Wikipedia during the banning period.
By the way, I think people should not be allowed to edit articles on Wikipedia when they don't have logged in. That way you also have a better handle on vandals.
It seems to me that there are probably many more ways to tackle this problem.
Greetings, Jaap