[Foundation-l] Autocreated global accounts (was: [Wikitech-l] $wgCentralAuthAutoNew=true)

[vacuum at jeb.no]

Although this may solve some problems at the larger communities, it might create a problem at smaller communities. Previously trolls could be detected because they was editing as anonymous, now they will be more likely to operate as logged in users.

If this shall be of real benefit somehow the smaller communities should be able to report a global user as troublesome. Turned around this could also lead to a small community blacklisting an otherwise good contributor.

All in all, I think it has to be carefully considered wetter it is necessary to make some special tools to deal with global trolls.

One simple measure could be to mark a global user as troll, and then lower the threshold to belove an autoconfirmed user. Such a mark should be visible in recent changes. This will somewhat limit the troll. A steward could then lift this global "ban" if a community has misplaced the mark, or a local admin in another project could remove the mark locally.

John

>On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 9:43 AM, Matthew Flaschen
><matthew.flaschen at gatech.edu> wrote:
>> Huib Laurens wrote:
>>> So a vandal has to make one account en can spam on all wiki's? Is
>>> there global blocking?
>>
>> Yes.  See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_blocking
>>
>
>Global blocking only works for IP addresses at this time (it was
>designed specifically that way).
>
>-- 
>Casey Brown
>Cbrown1023
>
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