[Foundation-l] Re: Autoblocking on all wikis now ?!?!?!

[Tim Starling]

Andre Engels wrote:
> Which I think shows that there is a PROBLEM here. Waerth is
> complaining, Montaia is asking, but who knows how many contributors
> and potential contributors are simply giving up, or have no idea where
> to ask?

Almost all of our bot-driven vandalism and spam comes from open proxies.
And the same open proxies are often used for email, IRC and IM spam. The
SORBS list only contains proxies which have been used for email spam, so
next time you see a complaint, think of all the spam you may have
received from that person. I'd rather encourage the people who run these
servers to secure them, and only unblock them as a last resort. It's in
Wikipedia's interests, as well as the interests of the general Internet
community.

-- Tim Starling