[Wikimedia-l] Event coordinators: how to create many accounts from 1 IP address

[MZMcBride]

Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
> When you're running an event, sometimes you want to help lots of people
> create accounts on Wikimedia sites.  To prevent spamming/vandalism,
> ordinarily there's a cap on the number of accounts that can be created
> from one IP address in a single day.  But there's a way to ask for a
> temporary removal of that restriction.  The Foundation's Maggie Dennis
> has written a quick HOWTO:
> 
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/How_to_request_lift_of_an_IP_cap
> 
> and so please feel free to link to it in your outreach HOWTOs, event
> planning checklists, and so on.  Thanks, Maggie!

Hi.

Before this guide gets distributed too widely, I'd think about its
scalability. Shell requests can take weeks, months, or even years to get
resolved, even when filed properly.

There was some talk about adding a whitelist to a MediaWiki page via an
extension (cf. <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25000> and
related SVN revisions). That would allow any local administrator to fix this
without a bunch of paperwork and editing PHP and syncing it everywhere.

Another option would be to add a time guarantee (e.g., "if you submit your
bug within two weeks of your conference/gathering/whatever, we'll have the
exemption ready").

The few people (shell users) capable of fulfilling these requests really
ought be doing other things, though. I'd go with the whitelist. The code's
already written, even, it just needs to be pushed out to a Hacks extension
or something: 
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/72959#c9219>.

MZMcBride