Righty. That unique number could be a cookie-based number. The first time someone visits, we assign them a cookie. Thereafter, they are identified by that cookie.
This is by no means a certain defense against an attacker. A only slightly sophisticated attacker could just turn off cookies in his or her browser.
But I imagine that the sort of pinhead who goes around writing "fart" in all the articles is also the sort of pinhead who wouldn't know how to turn off cookies.
The fallback, in the event that someone doesn't use cookies, could be the ip number. But we could further "munge" it into a unique identifier to help enhance privacy.
Robert Bihlmeyer wrote:
Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com writes:
Naturally, I wonder what else 168.143.112.xxx may have edited. It would be nice to be able to click on that as a link and see.
Indeed. And if this is implemented, maybe we could do away with showing IP adresses altogether? It seems to me that the only use for the addresses is hunting through Recent Changes in cases like the one you describe.
No functionality would be lost if the changlog rather showed a unique number with no (obvious) meaning, that, when clicked, led you to a list of changes coming from the same IP address.
-- Robbe