[WikiEN-l] Michael again

Wed Jul 16 05:30:48 UTC 2003

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> Erik wrote:
> >Vicki-
> >> Can someone ban user 205.188.xx.xx; it's Michael
> >> again and he's going after Hephaestos.
> >
> >Michael's edits should be auto-reverted when they are
>
> >identified. I hard-banned a previous incarnation
> >because he started moving pages around, which is more
>
> >difficult to revert. But if he only makes edits, it
> >is more efficient for us to stick to
> >reverting/deleting all edits made under
> >one pseudonym than to always have to figure out his
> >account du jour.
>
> But we have been doing this for months already - he
> simply will not get the point! It is high time we
> complained to AOL about this person. If that doesn't
> work after a couple of trys then the whole IP range
> that he uses should be blocked (and we should warn AOL
> that this might happen). We should, however, allow
> approved singed-in user accounts to edit from that IP
> range (such as User:Danny who uses the same IP block
> and anybody new who asks).
>
It's past time that we contact AOL about Michael. I'd do
it, but I doubt signing myself ``Geoff Burling, Wikipedia
contributor" would provide much clout: if one of the
sysops or developers could tackle this, I'd be much
obligied.

And if they forward all complaints about Michael to
/dev/null (for the non-techies, that means, roughly, that
they delete our email before reading), we should ask
Jimbo to make an attempt to approach them either via
email or through commercial connections. (I'd assume
that one of Boomis' salespeople must know a salesperson at
AOL who can refer us to the right person.)

And if we are forced to block AOL's block of IP addresses,
I'd suggest that we make the decision as public as possible:
posting to any relevant Usenet groups, web news sites
like Slashdot, & The Observer, etc. And give AOL enough
lead time to deal with Michael first -- even if they
only deal with this due to bad publicity.

But all of my talk ``let's do that if this doesn't work"
is just so many recycled electrons unless we make an
attempt to approach AOL about one of their users violating
their Terms Of Service; unless AOL is truly interested in
confirming their reputation as the toilet of the Internet,
it might take only one email from us for AOL to drop the
boom on this jerk.

Geoff