[Foundation-l] Global blocking needs to be halted for now

[mikelifeguard at fastmail.fm]

Valid contributors who are blocked by a global block may be given
ipblock-exempt. If your wiki doesn't have that, it can get it. We should
discuss giving this to all wikis, and/or making a global ipblock-exempt
group. You may also whitelist an IP or IP range locally. If you want admins
to know about these options, there is no magic bullet - someone needs to
tell them. Unfortunately, we have no way to tell all admins on all projects
anything, but I can agree we haven't done as well as we can. 

Localization is a problem, but there is no magic bullet. If you want more
languages supported, we need someone to do those localizations.

I would say there has been agreement that long blocks on Grawp ranges is
entirely appropriate. I should also note that these blocks are generally
discussed on the CheckUser mailing list. I believe all other blocks are
short-term, as you describe. For example, the latest block I saw in realtime
was for 1 day to stop a cross-wiki IP vandal.

Whether the log entry is comprehensible is a legitimate issue, and I agree
with you that the current examples are far less than idea. While we can't
have comments in every language we have a wiki in, we can at least be
descriptive, even if it's only in one language. "gwp" isn't helpful to most
contributors - even I had to think for a few seconds before understanding
that. The system message provided to blocked users should point them to
[[m:Global blocking]] and [[m:SRG]] (not the log comment) - if that's not
currently the case the system message should be changed.

In short, there are solutions, and the only way to solve the problems is to
solve them. So let's get going. But halting global blocking is absolutely
not the right way forward.

Mike