Angela wrote:
It is the IP of a user whose user name is blocked.
For
example, if you block "User:Angela", my IP is also
blocked, but for privacy reasons, that is shown as
#number, rather than displaying my actual IP.
This IP block happens automatically as soon as a user
blocked by name tries to access the site. If I dialled
up with a different IP and tried to log in as Angela,
that IP would be auto-blocked as well, showing up in
the block log as #1234 and I would see a message
telling me I was autoblocked because I share an IP
with Angela.
It is possible to unblock one but not the other.
Angela.
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com> wrote: > On
Special:ipblocklist, I see three basic types of
>entries. I
>only understand two of them.
>
>First, there's the ip block, for example:
>'Joe Sysop blocked 123.123.123.123'
>
>Second, there's the username block:
>'Jane Sysop blocked ReallyOffensiveName'
>
>Third, there's these:
>'Joe Sysob blocked #1521'
>
>What are those? There's no link to the contribs, so
>it's impossible
>to see what they are. The number appears to be the
>number of the block,
>not an identifier of what was blocked.
The original behaviour of the feature was to block both the user's name
and IP address. Allan Crossman pointed out in this message:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-September/005857.html
that this feature could be used by sysops to quietly gain the IP address
of any user, by blocking them briefly then unblocking them before they
made an edit. To address this, I added the "ipb_auto" field to the block
table, which is set for any automatically generated row. On
automatically generated rows, the primary key is shown instead of the IP
address.
-- Tim Starling