[WikiEN-l] Why not selective blocks?

[Thomas Dalton]

On 22/08/07, Adrian <aldebaer at googlemail.com> wrote:
> I'm sure this idea has already been kicked around, but why aren't there
> selective blocks, i.e. blocks restricted to one or more certain pages? I
> don't mean temporary bans on articles or article groups as occasionally
> imposed by the ArbCom, but a block-button block.

I started work on an extension to do exactly that (per-user whitelists
and blacklists of pages and namespaces). For the most part, it does
work, but because of the way the core code is written, it's very
difficult to get it to work well. For example, at the moment I have it
so it will tell you you're blocked, but it can't tell you why you're
blocked because it assumes you've been blocked by the standard process
and the block log isn't set right (I haven't looked into hacking the
block log and trying to make it work anyway, I might at some point).
The code would need to be rewritten with alternative block types in
mind before they can work properly.