E23 wrote:
Shouldn't be a problem, MediaWiki is smart enough to tell the names apart if you click "block" after the name in RC. Also, if in doubt, why not make a short block just to see how it works?
/E23
On 4/19/05, Anthere anthere9-at-yahoo.com wrote:
A request came to me from lb wikipedia.
The "good" user is this one : http://lb.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3ACornischong
The "bad" user is this one : http://lb.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3ACorni%C2%ADschong
In recent changes, they both appear as Cornischong. But the vandal is in reality Corni-schong
Cornischong is an admin on this wiki, he does not dare blocking the other Cornischong by fear he will be blocked as well...
What do you suggest ?
Anthere
Perhaps appropriately, %C2%AD codes for U+02AD, "latin letter bidental percussive", i.e. quite literally a special letter for the representation of the gnashing of teeth. Unfortunately, no glyph appears to be attached to this letter in most fonts. Firefox (at least on my setup) happily displays a glyph placeholder for this character, but, judging by my reading of the page source of the fake "Cornischong"s page, the MediaWiki software filters it out entirely before it reaches the browser.
This is another interesting special case of the character spoofing issue. where it appears that server-side attempts at filtering "bad" characters are actually making the spoofing problem worse, not better. Perhaps, for user account names, if the normalized string is not the same as the raw string, the user name should be blocked from creation or use, rather than being displayed in a spoofable form.
-- Neil