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Restrictions on Bulbapedia account creation, round II

Z

Zhen Lin

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So... Yet another round of this debate, triggered by yet another vandal who simply will not go away. The Chintss family of vandals is at a staggering 30 incarnations - all linked together through a set of shared IP addresses, all the same modus operandi.
  • Chintss
  • Brian davion
  • Mrmortisland
  • Karmasore
  • Edgey
  • Bobthefish
  • Junpei
  • Camr0n
  • Ruca
  • Yourname
  • Doomdaymassacre
  • Bank6000
  • Smcn
  • Dayve
  • Gamma8
  • Zer0man
  • Madragoran
  • Z2fool
  • Redhook
  • Nichole
  • Kogi
  • Kruge
  • Geese
  • Stalkerofursoul
  • Usnip
  • Altair
  • Scofco
  • Ch405kn16h7
  • Zero
  • Jestuh

So, what are we going to do about account creation? The previous debate was here.
 
Bob the fish? xD
Maybe the person is a fatfishshipper...
 
The procedure has been carried out and there is no problem. The last vandal was two months ago. I don't think we have a serious problem here.
 
You are telling me there is no problem when this vandal was creating accounts twice an hour, or more, from different IP addresses, all to continually avoid a ban and to continue vandal activity?
 
Zhen, how on earth are we supposed to prevent against someone who genuinely wants to vandalize?

Answer: without making it an absolutely closed community, which I think is against the entire spirit of Bulbapedia, we can't. We can make E-mail addresses mandatory, we can prevent bots from registering with those letter-things, but we cannot prevent a person from registering a legit account, turning around, and using it to vandalize while on a proxy.
 
If we can not prevent it, then we must do more to end it. I am not around 24 hours a day and can hardly be watching it 24 hours a day. This vandal, fortunately, did not get very far in actually vandalising anything because Ketsuban and Woopert were around to kill off and clean up after each incarnation.

But because no-one who knew how to shut off account creation was around, the problem continued for about 13 hours - and only 15 hours after it started was account creation shut down. This is something that could be helped.
 
Beyond a significantly improved notification system and finidng admins in time zones which litter the globe, I don't see any solutions.
 
Either hes extremely talented, or security is as low as it looks. unfortunetly I'm not that talented with security issues. A verification method that goes through the mods might be good. That was they can check IP's. If mediawiki can do that stuff. Virtually, Bulbapedia is being treated like a fish with 20 sharks around it. Meaning, that Bulbapedia can easily be infiltrated and is unsafe unless someone goes reaches out and saves one thing. More protection is needed or sharks will keep leaking into the fish tank (i have no idea why im using fish and sharks as examples). Imagine if i created 50 accounts on Bulbapedia, one a week. That probably would go unnoticed for a while and nothing would be stopping me. Thats basically what i think on the issue.
 
Yes, but what I said is that we cannot stop that. You can't stop someone who truly wants to be destructive short of totally locking them out--and then you invite DDoS's, which don't require a login.

For instance, a college will have all of its computers run on the same IP. So say we get a sudden influx from a certain IP--and even if we say that it's just a house, can we ban all of them simply because it's "suspicious?"
 
And since the community is older based people from the same college could be involved. Well that presents a problem. I have no idea.
 
College proxy servers are easily identified. It didn't take long to figure out that the Link Remover family was behind one.

However, not all colleges have those - some of the larger ones will actually assign one IP address per node, having purchased large segments of the address space. (MIT comes to mind - it owns at least a million IP addresses.)
 
Stupid Question: Are we banning E-mail addresses as well? I'm sure blocking each E-mail address along with blocking its linked account should at the very least slow a spammer down, having to register a new e-mail address each time he needs to make a new account.

If MediaWiki already does this, then forget I said anything. :)
 
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It does not, unfortunately. A few changes would need to be made in order for that to work - one, everybody who already has an account would have to register and then authenticate their email addresses, two, a new system for creating accounts must be created.
 
Hello Bulbapedian's

My name is Jamie and I am the webmaster of a wiki database very similar to yours. (Ours is about Marvel Comicbooks)

We are experiencing the same problem, It is becoming very problematic...

I have some ideas about what can be done about this, but would like to discuss this with someone else who has already gone through it once or twice.

Have a look at our site here: www.marveldatabase.com

Please email or PM me with your thoughts.
 
That's interesting - but how did you come across our problem?
 
Regarding the E-mail blacklist on Bulbapedia: Is it a good idea to publicly display blacklisted e-mail addresses? Or are we intentionally siccing mail spamer bots on them? :)
 
Aah, I do not myself know the prudence of doing so. But I could make it invisible if needed.
 
Anyway - for the time being, I have allowed account creation - via Special:Newaccount. The e-mail address will be checked against the blacklist - which can be updated by sysops at any time.
 
Please note: The thread is from 20 years ago.
Please take the age of this thread into consideration in writing your reply. Depending on what exactly you wanted to say, you may want to consider if it would be better to post a new thread instead.
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