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>