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Comment by TameAntelope | Hacker News Reader

I'm finding it a bit hard to follow the structure of this document so forgive me if this is what's being discussed, but wouldn't it make the most sense to block Anonymous editing from Apple Private Relay IP ranges? Once signed in, there is again a way to track the editor, and a way to deal with bad actors.

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The link is to the discussion page for some reason, which is a lot harder to follow. The actual article page for this one has a whole summary of the situation: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Apple_iCloud_Private_Relay

Linked page: "We are looking for answers to the following questions: Are you seeing problems related to the current iCloud Private Relay global blocks [1] on your wiki? Do you think that it's likely that good-faith editors will be affected by blocks? While we do not know for sure, we think that this situation may grow over the next couple of years. It is possible that other browsers, such as Chrome and Firefox, could follow a similar pattern and also restrict access to IP addresses. If this happens, it will be a major change in how the internet works. What do you think, in what ways would this change affect the wikis?"

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_blocks

"Global blocks are technical actions performed to prevent an IP address or range of IP addresses from editing all Wikimedia wikis, for a fixed period of time or indefinitely. Global blocks disable account creation from the blocked IP by default, and can also prevent editing while logged in to an account."

I'm regularly blocked from editing because I'm on a VPN. I don't get it, as long as I'm logged in then what's the problem? I'd love to know.

That doesn't work because Wikipedia doesn't store your IP forever if you have an account. If they allowed what you described, then you could make a bunch of accounts with your real IP, wait 90 days for the IP you made it from to be forgotten, then vandalize with them all over VPNs, and they couldn't do anything about it other than reactively blocking each account individually.

Then grade accounts by more than one metric. I've my account for years and made plenty of edits but it's treated like some newbie account that may be a bot? Because I value my privacy?

I use Britannica for anything that isn't celebrity/pop culture based now, I thought Wikipedia had killed off "proper" dictionaries but they're going in reverse. I enjoy the irony of that.

I assume the website owner intends to want to show ads or track me for marketing or other data harvesting purchases if they try to do further verification than password + 2FA code. They are forcing CAPTCHAs because they want to make it inconvenient enough such that I disable content blockers on their website.

> other than reactively blocking each account individually.

That doesn't seem all that unviable, at least specifically for Apple Private Relay IP ranges, is my point.

My decade-old account with thousands of edits and zero vandalization still get hard-blocked behind VPN. I once checked out the exemption process but felt discouraged to make a request (can’t remember why now). It’s pretty stupid.

My strong suspicion is that the blocking is done at a different layer.

Much easier to simply block posts/puts to certain paths from ip ranges in the ingress layer, before they ever reach the application and are authenticated.

Nah, the blocks happen inside mediawiki. There's nothing technically stopping it from exempting logged in users, just a policy choice.

Basically: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Range_blocks

For what it's worth, there's a policy for requesting an exemption to an IP block: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_block_exemption

I’ve tried, it’s next to impossible to get an exception, at least for English-language Wikipedia.

Hard IP bans are the exception and used when a lot of sock puppets are involved operating from the same IP range. Soft IP blocks don't prevent logged in users from editing. On enwiki you can try to get a 12-month IP block exemption: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_block_exemption

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