On Monday 11 November 2002 04:00 am, wikitech-l-request@wikipedia.org 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?
Regards,
Erik
This seems like a good idea. However many browsers now have the ability to easily block cookies so to combat this we would have to require everyone to accept cookies in order to edit - which I don't think is too Draconian.
It would be great to have this /in addition to/ the current IP blocks but please keep this functionality -- it is needed to at least temporarily block the more technically savvy.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)