[WikiEN-l] Re: more active censorship

Mon Jul 4 02:34:47 UTC 2005

On 7/4/05, Nathan J. Yoder <njyoder at energon.org> wrote:
> I also notice that no one has made an argument for why it should work
> that way, since it's clearly only meant to thwart block evasion (which
> this is not a case of).

You're right, Nathan. It does (at least in my estimation) seem to be
either a bug or a serious design flaw. I had a look through Bugzilla
(where the bugs with the software are reported) with a view to making
a report, and it appears to already be reported, at the following URL:
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=856

Perhaps a solution would be to only autoblock the IP address if the
user clicks edit while not logged in as the blocked username. That
way, if they try to edit with a brand new username the autoblock would
kick in (and thus avoid the problems you mentioned). It would also be
handy if the period for the autoblock were reduced to match the time
remaining on the main block, which is another bug/design flaw entirely
I think.

~Mark Ryan