Perhaps you could explain. So far, and I'm just
learning, once you
have the ip address you can then see where it is coming from and
sometimes whether it is a fixed or dynamic address. Blocking of
dynamic addresses is not good. You can also get an address to
complain to, assuming the problem is serious enough to justify that.
Thank you Fred. I'll try to explain but it's technical:
Currently, when an "anon" user edits an article, MediaWiki adds
something like this to a row in a MySQL database:
id: 1234567
userid: "34.19.215.33"
article: "Egypt"
change: <a diff between the new and old version>
tstamp: 20051113180645
When an edit is committed, MediaWiki checks if the user that made the
change has an account or not. If the user has an account it fills in
the userid field with that persons choosen alias. If not it checks the
IP number of the person and uses that as the userid. The solution to
the problem of exposing IP:s is to proxy them via an proxy-to-IP
mapping which looks something like this:
"anon1" => "34.19.215.33"
"anon2" => "179.55.66.77"
"anon3" => "215.108.3.2"
....
Each time an edit is comitted from an unknown IP address a new
proxy-to-ip-pair is added to the mapping. MediaWiki could then simply
look in the mapping for the proxy which has a certain IP. In the
example above, the proxy would be "anon1". And the "userid" field in
the row would contain "anon1" instead of "34.19.215.33". Preferably
only a few key developers and the MediaWiki software should be allowed
access to the proxy-to-IP mapping.
Checkuser would still work, but instead of returning an IP as a result
could return "user: [[foobar]], [[barfoo]] and [[anon9512]] shares an
IP address." Etc. There are technical solutions.
--
mvh Björn