I appreciate the difficulties involved, and I do not feel particularly
concerned about my privacy on Wikipedia, but I understand that there are
others who may feel differently.
One suggestion might be to do it only for flagged users. All users
banned banned for more than 24-hours would be flaqgged, and a special
database of their edit history from that moment on (including their AC
appeals correspondence) would be created. If there is a complaint that
User:New Troll is a reincarnation of User:Banned Troll then New Troll
will also be flagged. Of course this will only be effective for New
Troll's edits after that moment, but that's OK. If he makes no edits
after he has been flagged it only means that he is observing the ban,
which was the intent in the first place.
Ec
Tim Starling wrote:
Summary: It's no longer practical for developers
to look up the IP
addresses of logged in users, so I want to implement a method which
will make it much easier. Comments?
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Developers used to be able to look up the IP addresses of logged in
users, by searching the apache logs. However over the past year, due
to the increased complexity of our cluster setup and the increased
traffic, this has been getting more and more difficult. For example,
it took me 3 or 4 hours to determine the identities of several sock
puppets when asked to do so by the arbitration committee in relation
to the Wik case. The basic difficulties are:
1. Clock lag. The time in the squid logs is not necessarily the same
as the time in the database. Under heavy load, the difference can
change from edit to edit by 30s or so.
2. Edit conflicts and previews are indistinguishable from saves
3. Large amount of data makes searching slow
4. Recent edits, less than 1-1.5 days old, have logs spread across 3
squid servers
The first two items combine to make it difficult to assign IP
addresses to users, if the users are involved in a rapid edit war.
We had some difficulty recently merging and splitting the squid logs.
A large amount of recent log data was lost, when they almost filled up
the disk on zwinger. With this and the points listed above, I'm
inclined to declare the task of determining the IP address of a logged
in user impractical. It could potentially take hours to check if a
given user is a sock puppet, and even if I spent hours, I couldn't
guarantee that I could give any useful information even if they were
using the same IP address.
The reason we don't log IP addresses in a readable format is for
privacy. The idea is to discourage "casual snooping" by developers.
Perhaps this was appropriate 6 months ago, but the current setup makes
any kind of IP lookup impractical.
I'm of the opinion that checking the identity of sock puppets or
trolls is important for preserving the mental health of our regular
contributors. Hence I am proposing to store IP addresses of logged-in
users in the recentchanges table. This table has one entry per edit,
and older entries are automatically deleted. It is not available for
public download. This will make it easy for developers to match a
username to an IP address, for anyone who has edited the wiki recently.
Since this constitutes a weakening of the effective level of privacy
for contributors, it may be that some people will be opposed to this
feature. That's why I'm writing this post -- to find out what everyone
thinks of this. Is determining the identity of trolls important? Or
would you prefer to have IP addresses unlogged? Please speak up.