[Mediawiki-l] [PATCH] anonymous editing

[Nikola Smolenski]

Hanno Böck wrote:
> Am Mittwoch 27 Mai 2009 schrieb Nikola Smolenski:
>> I was thinking about this issue and I believe I have "the best of both
>> worlds" solution, if someone is willing to code it. Take an IP address,
>> concatenate it with a long string (salt), take its MD5 and use that as
>> the anons' username. Two different IPs will have two different anon
>> usernames, but for the readers it will not be possible to find out what
>> is the original IP from the username.
> 
> This method only works if the salt is kept secret and changed regularly. I 
> don't know how this could be implemented in a php app. If the salt is kept, 
> the anonymity is not guaranteed - the range of IPs allows just calculating 
> all of them with a given salt.

The salt must be unknown to users, of course. Site administrators may 
know it, but it is irrelevant since they can gather the same information 
from logs anyway.