Steve Bennett wrote:
On 3/26/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
- If a sufficiently easy way to circumvent the AOL proxies was found,
would you support rangeblocking the proxies permanently (or until AOL fixes their proxies to provide XFF headers)? This would force anyone editing from AOL to bypass the proxies somehow, but would also make blocking AOL vandals much easier. And what would you consider "sufficiently easy"?
Dear newbie, We don't like your ISP. No, that's not true. We hate your ISP. What's more, you're probably a vandal. If you'd like to contribute to Wikipedia, please jump through the following hoops. Thank you!
That's one way of putting it, yes. Another way to describe the situation can be found in the first few paragraphs of http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/XFF_project.
Personally, I wouldn't support forcing users to install a new browser just to edit Wikipedia. But if we can tell them that "to edit Wikipedia, you must first open menu X, select entry Y and uncheck the checkbox labelled FOO", that might be acceptable.