[WikiEN-l] Re: Michael again *sigh*

[Tim Starling]

The Cunctator wrote:
>>From:  Daniel Mayer
>>Thank you Tim! At least now we will force the vandals to take the time
>>needed
>>to create a new login and force their modem to fetch a new IP address.
>>
>>Auto expiration of IP bans and rollback of page moves would also be
>>nice...

Yeah, that's definitely going to happen before this is implemented. Any 
suggestions for expiration time?

>>Anything to slow down vandals like Micheal and the MIT vandal is a
> 
> good
> 
>>thing.
>>
> 
> Hooray! Let's make it into a competition, a game, because we know how
> unattractive computer games are to computer geeks!
> 
> Seriously, an arms race is not a useful allocation of developer energy,
> however much fun devising defensive stratefies is.

This is not an arms race of hacker against hacker, it's an arms race of 
hacker against troll. Michael is using nothing more advanced than a web 
browser. You shouldn't think of this as some kind of technological 
cure-all, it is just a tool in sysops' arsenals, like the rollback 
button. Sure a vandal can log out, change their IP address and log back 
in again, but the moment they make a change to a page, a sysop can ban 
them again. This greatly increases the cost to vandals, and reduces the 
cost to us.

That said, the worst-case scenario of a vandalbot is always in the back 
of my mind. This feature cuts off the simplest kinds of vandalbots, and 
slows down the more advanced ones, meaning that they cause less damage 
in the time it takes for a developer to respond.

Anthere asked:

 >Will this be working on any wikipedia as well ?

That's a very good question. Currently the feature can't be turned on 
and off easily, but if you want I can easily fix it up so that it can be.


-- Tim Starling <tstarlingphysicsunimelbeduau>