A situation has developed. As stated on the [bp=Bulbapedia:Administrator_noticeboard]administrator noticeboard[/bp], there is a persistent vandal who has made a sport of making sockpuppets to vandalise Bulbapedia. We know exactly what IP address he is coming from.
Here is the catch: one of the sysops is also behind the same university proxy server. There is no way to block that IP address without affecting him as well.
Therefore, I propose a radical solution. We are going to terminate anonymous user registration as we have done before in times of crises... but this time, we do not have any intentions of turning it back on.
There are about 600 registered users on Bulbapedia. While many of those would have come here by their own discovery, I think some of our best contributors came to know of Bulbapedia by word of mouth.
As Google has done with Gmail, I propose that we restrict user registration to a user-to-user invitation basis only. (Google is believed to have much the same rationale we had: to stop mass-registration of Gmail addresses by spambots.) This is simple enough to implement - a user will be able to register an account for another by going to Special:Userlogin, filling in the username and email address, and then clicking Create by email.
In addition, we are considering allowing users who do not have contacts to request one on BMGf.
It seems as if the terrorists have won - here we are discussing how to limit the freedoms of users for the ostensible reason of security. But I, for one, no longer have the patience to clean up after link-spammers and page-movers and other crude vandals. I am sure the other sysops will run out of patience one day soon.
Discuss.
Here is the catch: one of the sysops is also behind the same university proxy server. There is no way to block that IP address without affecting him as well.
Therefore, I propose a radical solution. We are going to terminate anonymous user registration as we have done before in times of crises... but this time, we do not have any intentions of turning it back on.
There are about 600 registered users on Bulbapedia. While many of those would have come here by their own discovery, I think some of our best contributors came to know of Bulbapedia by word of mouth.
As Google has done with Gmail, I propose that we restrict user registration to a user-to-user invitation basis only. (Google is believed to have much the same rationale we had: to stop mass-registration of Gmail addresses by spambots.) This is simple enough to implement - a user will be able to register an account for another by going to Special:Userlogin, filling in the username and email address, and then clicking Create by email.
In addition, we are considering allowing users who do not have contacts to request one on BMGf.
It seems as if the terrorists have won - here we are discussing how to limit the freedoms of users for the ostensible reason of security. But I, for one, no longer have the patience to clean up after link-spammers and page-movers and other crude vandals. I am sure the other sysops will run out of patience one day soon.
Discuss.
