[Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia-wide global blocking mechanism?

[David Gerard]

I've just sent this to wikitech-l, but what I'm proposing is a *big*
hammer, so needs lots of due consideration. Please pick holes in the
idea.


- d.



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>
Date: 31 Jan 2008 10:18
Subject: Wikimedia-wide global blocking mechanism?
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>


Discussions on the checkuser list (which is Wikimedia-wide) suggest
that an all-project blocking mechanism would be very useful in keeping
our more persistent vandals from hopping from project to project,
wreaking havoc. This happens quite a bit.

A variant of Wikia's regex block would be a likely candidate for a
useful implementation.

One detail it would need (in some coder's Copious Free Time) would be
an option to unblock a globally-blocked IP or range locally. (One use
case would be a local ISP which has several good editors from a small
project, but has open proxies or similar that are a source of
vandalism on many other projects.)

Presumably such a global block would only be available to stewards, on
due consideration.

Before anyone starts coding - what are the devs' thoughts on a global
blocking mechanism? What could go badly wrong?


- d.