-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 > So then blocking Tor is intended to block people that temporarily have > access to large amounts of unblocked IP addresses, but usually are IP > blocked? > > Who does this apply to? If a vandal has access to unblocked IP addresses > to make accounts, they can just use those to edit or sockpuppet.
So I don't actually administer blocks on English Wikipedia, and I am not an editor on any other language Wikipedias, but on English Wikipedia this is what I understand the process to be. When a user acts up and has an account we temporarily block that account. If they decided to create another account we usually block the new account permanently and hard-block the IP address that they are accessing the site from. This prevent them from making a new account or sockpuppeting while logged out. Most users don't evade blocks, so this tends to work pretty well. With Tor unblocked a significant minority of those users who had their IP address hard-blocked will use Tor to create new accounts and continue to cause problems. With Tor blocked they have to find another means. Some of them do, but most of them give up. Its a war of attrition. We know that problematic people /will/ find a way to cause a problem, we just make it expensive enough that they get bored and don't bother. We block all proxies that we know of for the same reason. Apparently that significant minority of folks that would abuse Tor seems to outnumber those who legitimately use Tor, or at least that is the impression those who have to clean up the mess have. The point of an IP Block Exemption (IPBE) is to give an especially trusted user the ability to login and edit even if they are doing so from a hard-blocked IP address. All administrators automatically have this flag. As far as I know the reason why it is not given out easily is that in the past some users would create extra accounts before they were blocked, and make some constructive edits with those accounts. Then when their main account was blocked, they would wait long enough for the IP addresses on the sleeper accounts to be removed from our logs and then request IP Block Exemptions via email. This is also why you can't just email in and say "Hey, can you make me an account please and give it an IPBE? kthxby" Personally I think the policy for IPBEs has swung too far in the direction of never-give-them-out, but I don't think I will have any luck changing that unless I can find some way to help assure that it is still very expensive for vandals and sockpuppets to use Tor and proxies to evade blocks. Does that answer the question? Or am I still unclear? Thank you, Derric Atzrott -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32) iD8DBQFULGUERHoDdZBwKDgRAiBUAJ43QbhZXedzO0RFOkKQNdo+C/f2DACfXcL7 7wsoZQWU1x4egsKhYfmINQM= =u9uT -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- tor-talk mailing list - [email protected] To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
