Our blocking tools suck. It is a trivial matter to defeat blocks, and any vandal worth his salt can do it in his sleep. (User:Philippe). Anyone who works a sockpuppet investigation page or is a victim of repeated on-wiki harassment can attest to this. Block evasion doesn't have to be deliberate -- in some parts of the world, users can be assigned a different IP address by their ISP for every edit they make. We effectively have no measures against these users.
The aim here is threefold -- to make it more difficult to evade blocks, make it easier for us to identify and deal with potential sockpuppets as soon as possible-- ideally before they start editing -- and keep collateral damage at a minimum. This proposal has multiple facets:
* Look at other forum/blog/wiki software (e.g. Wordpress, vBulletin) and determine which blocking tools can be feasibly integrated into MediaWiki (not as an extension) subject to the constraints in our privacy policy. Implement them.
* Implement the existing tickets:
-- Sets a blocked user cookie {T5233}
Added 27 November: investigate the use of Evercookie-like and other obnoxious tracking techniques to make the cookie harder to remove, while remaining within our privacy policy.
* Block by user agent only, don't block the underlying IP {T1000070}
* Throttle account creation by user agent {T106930}
* When the account creation throttle is hit, flag all accounts that were created by that user (limit to Checkuser if necessary) {T107651}
* Recursive checkuser {T11858}
* Checkuser watchlist feature {T21796}
* Block by device ID (needs check with WMF Legal first)
* Added 27 November: if an account with a registered email address is blocked with account creation blocked, prevent creation of any new accounts with that email address. (Optional, because we don't require email on registration.)
* Any other suggestions from the community that will help tackle this problem.
Improved blocking tools may be assigned to the Checkuser group initially to get a feel for how much collateral damage they cause. This will ideally reduce the burden of cleaning up after spammers, vandals and long term abusers, reduce the amount of on-wiki harassment of the type referred to in the diff above and will benefit all good faith editors of any MediaWiki installation.
MER-C (talk) 12:06, 8 November 2015 (UTC)
This card tracks a proposal from the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey
This proposal received 33 support votes, and was ranked #29 out of 107 proposals. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Moderation_and_admin_tools#Improve_MediaWiki.27s_blocking_tools