[Foundation-l] Global blocking needs to be halted for now

Ray Saintonge saintonge at telus.net
Wed Sep 17 04:11:03 UTC 2008


mikelifeguard at fastmail.fm wrote:
> From: Birgitte SB [mailto:birgitte_sb at yahoo.com] 
>   
>> Frankly how to handle these anticipated problems _should_ have been decided
>> in concert with the decision to implement of this feature.  I had thought
>> they had been.  Obvoiusly the feature was rolled out without addressing the
>> concerns that people expressed over this during the intial discussion of
>> such a feature.  That should not have happened but here we are.
>>     
> That's actually false - the discussion regarding global blocking addressed
> these concerns explicitly and extensively, as you can well see for yourself:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Global_blocking and
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Global_blocking/Archive_1
>
> Ipblock-exempt and a local whitelist on the IP are both options you are free
> to use to help legitimate users caught in global blocks.
>   
Those are talk pages, and the fact that there had to be an archive is 
clear evidence that the discussion was a lengthy one.  But wading 
through endless talk pages is no way to find an answer to an immediate 
problem. 

Documentation for how to deal with the kinds of problems that Birgitte 
has encountered should be easily available on each site.  The Village 
Pump is probably not the best place since that is mostly for current 
discussions, and it will not be easily found after the notice has been 
archived.  To expect non-technical people to resort to Bugzilla is 
expecting too much.

Ec




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