I am one of sysops at cs: Wikipedia. Recently there was a spate registered
user's disruptive edits somewhere between trolling and outright vandalism.
There is a need to ban him temporarily, but there's no way to do it:
As far as I understood en:Wikipedia:Blocking_policy#How_to_block, you're just
supposed to go to Special:Blockip, or cs:Speciální:Blockip, and put the
username into the IP address field. However, this results in the
MediaWiki:Badipaddress error message.
I don't know anything about MediaWiki and have no particular understanding of
PHP, but the respective script in CVS
(
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/phase3/includes/SpecialBloc….
php?rev=1.30) also tests the variable $wgSysopUserBans, which apparently
(
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/phase3/includes/DefaultSett…
.php?rev=1.30) is false by default:
# User rights
(...)
$wgSysopUserBans = false; # Allow sysops to ban logged-in users
I, or at least Google, found no other instance of the variable anywhere, so no
way to set it to true either. On the other hand, there must be a way to do it -
there are bannings going on at en: all the time. So, could somebody with better
knowledge of the system tell me whether I missed anything, or whom should I ask
to set this in cs? Or is there a workaround, a way to find out a registered
user's IP address?
Thanks a lot for any help.
--
Jan Vanek jr. (cs:Wikipedista:Mal%C3%BD%C4%8Dten%C3%A1%C5%99,
en:User:Malyctenar)
P. S. It might be also worth changing the SpecialBlockip script to give
another, more appropriate error message in such cases.