On Friday, July 11, 2014, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
This is one of those perennial proposals that never quite seems to take off; I can remember having some version of this discussion back in 2008, and I know that some of our earliest edits show a partially obscured IP address, not the whole thing. It might require Brion or Tim or someone else of that length of experience to explain the original thinking.
As I recall, UseModWiki (the perl-based wiki software we used before switching to a custom solution which evolved into MediaWiki) obscured the last octet of the IP address, which still left you with enough information in most cases to track down an ISP or school/business/govt institution. I think UseMod also exposed the IP addresses of logged-in users, but the way logins worked were very different and it was possible to set your name to someone else's name or some such oddities...
I'm not sure offhand if there was explicit discussion of switching to not obscuring the last octet in the PHP software/nascent MediaWiki... But this was back in 2001 when the internet was a little younger and everybody was spewing their IP addresses all over their email and newsgroup posts too. Folks are a lot more paranoid about that today.
In general I favor migrating away from publicly exposing IP addresses, but not sure to what exactly would be best... I kinda like the idea of an anonymous-but-consistent "proto-account" that can be transformed into a named login if desired, but it needs to be thought out in more detail to resolve potential difficulties.
-- brion