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Comment by vdnkh | Hacker News Reader

> Blocking – making it more difficult for someone who is blocked from the site to return

If they're talking about IP bans on viewing Wikipedia here, this is a terrible idea. If some troll gets banned on a college campus that will result in the inadvertent ban of thousands of other connected to the same network. This line strikes me as naive.

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Perhaps the blocks aren't implemented as naively as you assume. It wouldn't be too difficult, as per your example, to distinguish between an IP that is shared by many devices and one with more limited use. There are also other ways to block besides just IP-based.

I do agree with you that the nature of the internet makes blocking people from free (non-paid) sites inherently difficult though.

The first proposed suggestion is to send a cookie when a blocked account logins and have it be sent if they logout and tries to create new accounts. I personally doubt this will have a major effect on system which has user accounts (like college campus) but libraries could get problems.

The second is to limiting the scope of a IP ban so that it only effects specific user-agent strings, trying to only effecting the intended user.

The third suggestion is to create a cookie when a new account is created that "counts" the number of times a new account is created on a single machine.

Cookies as a security mechanism? Relying on people not knowing about Ctrl+Shift+Del or incognito mode or user-agent chooser extensions or just using different browsers? Who seriously thinks that's going to work?

These tools are never going to be perfect, just roadblocks. Many people don't know those tricks.

They've been dealing with this issue for years. If you're on a university campus you can access wikipedia and see the recent changes, there's usually a weird mix of very obscure academic content getting added and undergraduates adding insults about their friends.

If there is a sudden spike in vandalism I believe they just require you to log in with an account usually.

There's a difference between editing and viewing. :-)

I've also found IP bans to be ineffective due to serious collateral damage. I think shadow-banning is one of the most effective methods.

How possible is that on Wikipedia though where you are expecting to see your edits? On Reddit people rarely go back and look at a thread they commented on from an unlogged in computer.

Unless the user is trying to bypass the shadowban (by verifying anonymously), they should see "what they expect" whereas others won't see it.

Given this was talking about harassment, I assumed it could cover comments in article discussions reasonably effectively.

If you shadowbanned a ip because of a user and others with that ip could still view the site read only you would only unconvinced people that wanted to make edits which would be probably rare .

We're still not sure shadowbanning is not liable behavior for fraud. So that is a risk to take all on its own.

I would expect browser fingerprinting and other similar techniques would be more likely to be used.

Wikimedia believes browser fingerprinting of users is too intrusive and against their privacy policy.

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