Discussions on the checkuser list (which is Wikimedia-wide) suggest that an all-project blocking mechanism would be very useful in keeping our more persistent vandals from hopping from project to project, wreaking havoc. This happens quite a bit.
A variant of Wikia's regex block would be a likely candidate for a useful implementation.
One detail it would need (in some coder's Copious Free Time) would be an option to unblock a globally-blocked IP or range locally. (One use case would be a local ISP which has several good editors from a small project, but has open proxies or similar that are a source of vandalism on many other projects.)
Presumably such a global block would only be available to stewards, on due consideration.
Before anyone starts coding - what are the devs' thoughts on a global blocking mechanism? What could go badly wrong?
- d.