On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
Sounds good, but only a sysop could change that status
of the page. Or
maybe there could be a cookie identifier on each person's computer so we
could track them? The cookie would be blockable.
Using cookies to track users would not be as effective as you appear to
think it is. Altering cookies is a remarkably trivial exercise, only a
little more complicated than changing the wallpaper on your computer screen.
(Then again, I used to do phone support for the Netscape browser, so maybe
it's only trivial to me.)
Perhaps if the relevant token in the cookie were encrypted -- say along
the lines of how the password is encrypted in Linux -- then it would
discourage all but the most determined attempts to masquerade as the
targetted user. But in any case, it would still be trivial for someone
like Lir/Vera/Susan to create a new identity by deleting the token when
Wikipedia started blocking him/her based on the token in the cookie.
Geoff