christian wrote:

The proposed patch

Attached:

ral315 wrote:

I highly disagree with any solution that makes it easier for vandals to edit
Wikipedia. Allowing tor users to edit Wikipedia makes it tough on everyone- think
about a bunch of Willy on Wheels-like vandals, using tor to circumvent blocks. If
you're worrying about using an anonymizer to edit Wikipedia, perhaps it's best you
don't edit it at all.

christian wrote:

Anonymizers, especially encrypting anonymizers such as Tor that make it
impossible to snoop your Internet traffic, are important for everyone who wants
to contribute to topics which are illegal or very controversial in their
country, e.g. democracy in China or homosexuality in Saudi Arabia.

The hope is that this patch, or a related solution, would make Tor inattractive
enough for most vandals to go away (they'll be blocked, after all), while still
allowing such legitimate cases of anonymity. Whether it would work for this
purpose remains to be seen, but for this it would be necessary to try it out. If
it fails to work (the vandals stay), Tor exit nodes will end up being almost
permanently blocked, and finally Tor would be removed from the range of
auto-unblocking IPs, so we wouldn't be worse of than now.

It would also be useful for dynamic IP spaces, e.g. AOL, where permanent blocks
cause collateral damage instead of blocking the targeted abuser.

robchur wrote:

It is now possible to block IP address ranges while allowing logged-in users to
edit through them; it is furthermore possible to whitelist such ranges. The
autoblocker has been tweaked to behave itself.

I'm closing this as fixed indirectly.