Andrew Garrett andrew at epstone.net Sat Jun 7 08:28:10 UTC 2008

I had a discussion with FT2 on IRC a few hours ago. He said that he would be happy to have a soft-block, with these provisions:

1. A special page exists which allows the monitoring of recent tor

edits. Perhaps Special:Recentchanges/tor? 2. A new protection level is added, which allows tor users to be prevented from editing an article, which, for instance, has concerns with regard to sockpuppeting and so on.

What do others think of these?

-- Andrew Garrett

Apologies, I sadly need to correct this. We spoke at length. The topic was Andrews question "what software or other measures might mean I would feel able to change my current view and endorse a soft-block approach to tor".

We spoke at length exploring ideas, one of which was perhaps a way to protect a page so that tor could not be used on it (unless a user who was specifically IP block exempt). This was joint exploration of a difficult problem, and the question was a good one. However about an hour into the conversation I came to understand that TorBlock was not now going to be used as I had thought, to require a long autoconfirm (many days + many edits). Even with a long "autoconfirm" period I was not sure any solution below hard blocking was possible. But we tried to see if we could find ideas anyway.

With my understanding corrected, and no "long extended period" I dead-ended. With regret I therefore have to correct the mis-impression that I would be "happy" to have a soft-block on these conditions. I tried hard, and both of us talked for a long time, exploring many novel options, but I was not able to find any that did the job short of hard blocking, even so :-/

I'm very very sorry if I had left Andrew with that incorrect impression. We tried hard to brainstorm "what could be done in software that might make it practicable to avoid ". We looked at many ideas, and did so positively and constructively. But ultimately nothing came up that would actually fix the main problem at all, other than hard blocking, and that remains therefore my current view on it. Tor hard blocked + IP block exemption for those needing it. We just get too much tor abuse (including quite sophisticated abuse) to do less on this specific wiki, even if it is not that way on other wikis. :-/

FT2