Summary
Tighten the temporary account creation rate limits to reduce the amount of abuse and overall volume of temporary account creation, while still making it easy for good faith anonymous edits to be made.
Background
We have received persistent feedback from enwiki community members about the unexpectedly high number of temporary accounts making good- and bad-faith edits on the platform.
While our analysis shows that most temporary accounts are associated with 1 IP address, and that “clusters” of temporary accounts are comparatively uncommon, the absolute number of them, and the size that they can reach, are still causing issues for users who fight vandalism.
This includes both bad-faith editors who deliberately try to avoid bans and detection, as well as good-faith editors who (either mistakenly, or out of an attempt to preserve privacy) make a new temporary account per-edit. Both kinds of clusters cause significant overhead for anti-vandalism work.
To deal with this, we want to tighten temporary account creation rate limits to reduce the volume of unnecessary temporary account creations, while ensuring that good faith contributions can continue to be made. There are two scenarios we aim to impact:
- abuse from users who clear cookies, change browsers, etc and generate multiple temporary accounts in a day, and dozens over the course of a week. We want to limit this avenue for abuse
- good faith users who make dozens of good contributions via incognito windows, and frequently lose their temporary accounts as a result. We want to nudge these users towards creating accounts
Acceptance criteria
- Lower the 6 per day limit to 2 temp account creations per day
- Introduce a new limit of 4 temp account creations per week
- Introduce a new limit of 6 temp account creations per month
- No change to the 1 per 10 minute cool off period rate limit
- These limits are global in nature and should apply to all wikis