> I kinda like the idea of an
> anonymous-but-consistent "proto-account" that can be transformed into a
> named login if desired, but it needs to be thought out in more detail to
> resolve potential difficulties.
One could automatically create a pseudo-account ("Anonymous #12345") upon
first edit. And that account would always be authenticated automaticallly
upon future edits coming from the same IP address. I don't think it should
be allowed to turn those pseudo-accounts into proper accounts, though,
they'd be marked as anonymous pseudo-accounts forever. Otherwise having a
way to upgrade to a proper account while conserving edits which were
potentially written by other people could get hairy, especially from a
legal standpoint.
Maybe it's a cookie-based approach you had in mind? Where we automatically
create an account tied to the user agent. That would mitigate the issue of
converting a pseudo-account that might have been shared between several
people to a proper account, but not completely get rid of it.
On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 11:45 AM, Brion Vibber <[email protected]>
wrote:
> On Friday, July 11, 2014, Risker <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > This is one of those perennial proposals that never quite seems to take
> > off; I can remember having some version of this discussion back in 2008,
> > and I know that some of our earliest edits show a partially obscured IP
> > address, not the whole thing. It might require Brion or Tim or someone
> else
> > of that length of experience to explain the original thinking.
>
>
> As I recall, UseModWiki (the perl-based wiki software we used before
> switching to a custom solution which evolved into MediaWiki) obscured the
> last octet of the IP address, which still left you with enough information
> in most cases to track down an ISP or school/business/govt institution. I
> think UseMod also exposed the IP addresses of logged-in users, but the way
> logins worked were very different and it was possible to set your name to
> someone else's name or some such oddities...
>
> I'm not sure offhand if there was explicit discussion of switching to not
> obscuring the last octet in the PHP software/nascent MediaWiki... But this
> was back in 2001 when the internet was a little younger and everybody was
> spewing their IP addresses all over their email and newsgroup posts too.
> Folks are a lot more paranoid about that today.
>
>
> In general I favor migrating away from publicly exposing IP addresses, but
> not sure to what exactly would be best... I kinda like the idea of an
> anonymous-but-consistent "proto-account" that can be transformed into a
> named login if desired, but it needs to be thought out in more detail to
> resolve potential difficulties.
>
> -- brion
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