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
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?
This sounds like a reasonable tool, one among many.
We have yet to deal with a really persistant vandal. 99.9% of them just need to be slightly discouraged.
--Jimbo
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?
Seems like a step in a right direction to me.
If we must ban some people it would be nice to be banning only the actual vandals.
Regards, Mike Irwin
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
Jaap van Ganswijk wrote: [cut]
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.
[cut]
Er zal dan wel minder vandalisme zijn maar dan leg je de lat wel een stuk hoger voor mensen om mee te werken. Hoe eenvoudig de registratie ook is, het zal mensen tegenhouden. En er zijn anonieme medewerkers die zeer waardevolle bijdragen leveren. Het zou zeer jammer zijn om die uit te sluiten.
There will by less vandalism but you make it more difficult for people to work at wikipedia. How simple the recording also is, it will stop men. And there are anonymous users who provide very good contributions. It would be very unfair to exclude those.
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?
I don't think that this is particularly *soft*, just less error prone that banning by IP. That is, it's less prone to errors of one type (banning the innocent) and more prone to errors of the other type (not banning the guilty).
Will it work? We could test the situation by giving anonymous users such cookies and seeing how often the same IP comes back without the same cookie. Then we could try to determine if any of these cases are the same person. If not, or if rarely, then this method will have a good chance of working, on the technically unsavvy.
-- Toby
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