Page MenuHomePhabricator

Prevent contributions attributed to private and WMF IP addresses
Closed, ResolvedPublic

Description

Occasionally a misconfiguration results in edits being seen by MediaWiki as coming from 127.0.0.1, as shown by this non-empty contributions log. Further, wikis such as the English Wikipedia had previously blocked Toolserver IPs but have been unable to do the same for Tool Labs thanks to issues such as T66530.

Since the IPs subject to these issues are well-known and typically don't change, we can easily enough add a configuration option to MediaWiki to treat these IPs as blocked "anon. only, talk page access disabled" without running into the XFF issues described in T66530.

Event Timeline

Change 324215 had a related patch set uploaded (by Anomie):
Set $wgSoftBlockRanges

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/324215

Change 324214 had a related patch set uploaded (by Anomie):
Add $wgSoftBlockRanges

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/324214

An announcement might be something like this:

Edits and other contributions logged to private IP addresses will be blocked, displaying the reason from [[MediaWiki:softblockrangesreason]]. This should not affect most users, however bots and other tools running on [[mw:Wikimedia Labs|Wikimedia Labs]], including [[wikitech:Portal:Tool Labs|Tool Labs]], will receive a "blocked" error if they attempt to edit without being logged in.

Change 324215 had a related patch set uploaded (by Gergő Tisza):
Set $wgSoftBlockRanges

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/324215

This was announced a while ago in Tech News and on labs-l but not actually deployed. Doing that today.

Change 324215 merged by jenkins-bot:
Set $wgSoftBlockRanges

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/324215

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2017-02-22T00:33:42Z] <thcipriani@tin> Synchronized wmf-config/InitialiseSettings.php: SWAT: [[gerrit:324215|Set $wgSoftBlockRanges]] T154698 PART I (duration: 00m 40s)

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2017-02-22T00:34:53Z] <thcipriani@tin> Synchronized wmf-config: SWAT: [[gerrit:324215|Set $wgSoftBlockRanges]] T154698 PART II (duration: 00m 42s)

The block message seems wrong:

$ curl -s -X POST -d 'action=edit&format=json&title=User%3ATgr_(WMF)%2Ftest&appendtext=--%3D%3D+This+is+a+test+%3D%3D--&token=%2B%5C' https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php | jq .
{
  "error": {
    "code": "blocked",
    "info": "You have been blocked automatically by MediaWiki.",
    "blockinfo": {
      "blockid": null,
      "blockedby": "MediaWiki default",
      "blockedbyid": 0,
      "blockreason": "__NOEDITSECTION____NOTOC__\n{| id=\"mw-blocked-text\" style=\"border:2px solid #000; width:100%; margin:0 auto 6px auto;\"\n|\n<div style=\"width:100%; margin:auto; text-align:center;\"><div style=\"font-size:180%; color:#ff0000;\"><br>'''You are currently unable to edit Wikipedia.'''</div>\n'''''You are still able to view pages''', but you are not currently able to edit, move, or create them.''\n</div>\n<div style=\"margin:auto; width:70%;\">\n<div style=\"text-align:justify;\">\nEditing from $7 is disabled as it is a [[private IP]] range. This is probably a result of a problem with your Internet connection.\n\nEven if blocked, you will ''usually'' still be able to edit your [[Special:Mytalk|user talk page]] and email other editors and administrators.\n</div>\n</div>\n|}",
      "blockedtimestamp": "2017-02-22T01:54:06Z",
      "blockexpiry": "infinite",
      "systemblocktype": "wgSoftBlockRanges"
    },
    "*": "See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php for API usage. Subscribe to the mediawiki-api-announce mailing list at &lt;https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api-announce&gt; for notice of API deprecations and breaking changes."
  },
  "servedby": "mw1278"
}

I suppose this is a problem with the block API, not this patch? (Also, it wold be quite nice if errorformat applied to the block reason.)

At the API level, "blockreason" is just the string from $block->mReason. We'd have to change Block to supply a Message instead of a bare string for the API to be able to apply errorformat.

The text you're seeing there is thanks to enwiki having already customized MediaWiki:Softblockrangesreason. The default message (e.g. add uselang=someinvalidlanguage) is much cleaner:

{
   "servedby" : "mw1284",
   "error" : {
      "code" : "blocked",
      "blockinfo" : {
         "blockreason" : "Anonymous contributions are not allowed from your IP address (10.68.23.58). Please log in.",
         "blockedtimestamp" : "2017-02-22T16:40:06Z",
         "blockedby" : "MediaWiki default",
         "systemblocktype" : "wgSoftBlockRanges",
         "blockedbyid" : 0,
         "blockexpiry" : "infinite",
         "blockid" : null
      },
      "*" : "See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php for API usage. Subscribe to the mediawiki-api-announce mailing list at &lt;https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api-announce&gt; for notice of API deprecations and breaking changes.",
      "info" : "You have been blocked automatically by MediaWiki."
   }
}

Yeah, I got that, I was just confused about the $7 parameter. It hadn't occured to me it could be just a template error.