[WikiEN-l] banned anons

Mon Aug 9 23:06:04 UTC 2004

I was thinking about blocking of proxy IPs of anonymous editors, which
may sacrifice another possilble contributor who shares the IP, but may
be necessary to get rid of the very annoying vandals. I came to an
idea.

Why don't we put a cookie on the anon users browsers, so they could be
tracked with something more than the IP (say, an ID)? Of course it can
be circumvented by legitimate anons who care about their privacy, or
by serious vandals who know enough about how cookies work, but we may
be able to get rid of the insisting newbie vandals (who are the guys
who create the most problems for likes of me).

The idea can be extended to things like putting a cookie trap, which
an admin can turn on for a certain article, which then assigns IDs to
each anon contributor that edits the page, and then only block the
<IP, ID> pair instead of the IP.

I know it may be hard codewise, of course.

roozbeh