On sab, 2002-04-20 at 22:16, Daniel Lee Mayer wrote:
On Saturday I blocked 212.138.47.12 after this person deleted content from at least three Islam related articles ([[Qur'an]], [[Dialect]], & [[Muslim language]]).
(See notes in [[Wikipedia talk:Blocked IPs]] for more details.)
It would be nice if I could have stated my reason why as part of the blocking process and for [[wikipedia:Blocked IPs]] to show up in Recent Changes with my explanation automatically in an edit comment.
Agreed, I was going to add that feature but didn't finish it. I'll get on that...
I really don't think the current seemingly hush-hush setup will alleviate fears in some that a secretive cabal has taken over the 'pedia. I know that this is not the case and not the intention of the current setup, but others don't.
We should be completely open with everything we do and the software needs to be tweaked to make this natural and easy. There should also be a notice on [[wikipedia:Blocked IPs]] telling the world just how long an IP is blocked
The time the ban was made appears in the list. Unfortunately, it appears as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970. :)
That's already fixed in the development version.
and there should eventually be the ability for other sysops to undue an IP ban if a mistake has been made.
All sysops can un-ban people simply by editing [[wikipedia:Banned IPs]] and removing the address in question from the list. Maybe this should be stated in a message at the top of the page?
On a related front: Is it possible to block the IP of a logged in user? There is nothing stopping a vandal from logging in and doing harm. Although I am not aware of any logged in user actually performing a systematic assault on articles there have been several logged in users uploading copyrighted or inappropriate material.
No, not at this time. Blocks will (I think) apply to anyone, whether they *subsequently* log in or not, but if they're logged in while they do their initial dirty work there's no way to ban them (short of having Jimbo comb through the server logs to find their IP address) because the IP won't be recorded in the database, just the username.
BTW it also would be nice to be able to more easily track what these vandals have done so that the other damage these people have probably done can be fixed. Otherwise many of the less obvious changes these people have made will be obscured by someone else editing a vandalized article in order to improve it -- thus removing their IP/user name from Recent Changes. Could "contributions of xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" automatically be generated and placed on [[wikipedia:Blocked IPs]] when xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is blocked?
Yeah, that's easy to do. I'll add it if there's no objection.
As soon as we decide what to do with these issues in general this discussion should be switched to the developer mailing list to work out the details.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)