[WikiEN-l] contacting schools

[Deathphoenix]

I have some success with Lancaster University. I originally slapped one of
their proxies with a 6 month AO block due to persistent, long term
vandalism, but one of the sysadmins contacted me and told me they have XFF
headers. After some fruitful discussion/negotiation, I removed the block and
put up a header on the talk pages for their four proxies asking anyone who
blocks the IP (or issues a warning) to also send an email to their abuse
email, or to ask me to send and email. FYI, I have links to the four proxies
at [[User talk:Deathphoenix/Lancaster]] (the IP talk page header is at
[[User:Deathphoenix/Lancaster]]).

Lancaster's IT department has been quite good at identifying vandals and
forwarding the cases to their internal departments. Quite a number of
student-vandals have had stern talking-tos from the head of their User
Services department, and they have all been quite repentant once they
realise that they are NOT anonymous.

My suggestions for the school network admins and staff would be:

1. Implement XFF headers and make sure students have to log in using a
unique user ID (easiest would be based on student number) before using
school computers.
2. Have an easy-to-contact abuse email address that we can slap on the IP
talk page, asking people to forward vandalism diffs.
3. Act promptly to reports sent to the abuse email address and (optionally)
let the abuse reporter know when the vandal is identified and if any action
has been taken.

Cheers,

DP

On 5/1/07, Aude <audevivere at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Does anyone have experience contacting schools regarding vandalism and can
> offer advice/best practices?
>
> I had to block one of the schools one of the jurisdictions where I
> attended
> school, and comfortable contacting them.  They can possibly track down
> which
> student did the latest vandalism, but not really sure what the school can
> do
> to stop them.  I only speculate that it's a relatively small number of
> other
> kids responsible for previous incidents of vandalism from the
> school.  Does
> that sound reasonable?
>
> The majority of edits from the school IP are not constructive, but some
> are
> constructive.  The volume of vandalism is moderate, but manageable (on our
> end) and not high as I've seen with other schools.  And have no idea how
> many students and staff there edit with accounts.  I prefer not simply
> blocking the whole school because of some bad kids.
>
> What other things can the school network administrator and staff do?  Any
> suggestions?
>
> --Aude
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