Hi all,

Just a quick note to let everybody know that in a few days I’ll be changing the TorBlock configuration to require explicit block exemption rather than merely being logged in.

While we would rather this weren’t necessary, it seems that the edits coming through tor are mostly unconstructive; and we’ve had all kinds of nasty harassment come through that way — the community feedback we asked for was overwhelmingly that the ideological benefits of allowing truly anonymous editing are outweighed by the pragmatic concerns of
harassment and vandalism.

To facilitate this, I will also be activating explicit IP block exemption on all wikis. Like on English Wikipedia and many other wikis, administrators will be able to add users to an “IP block exempt” group, which exempts its holder from IP blocks, range blocks and autoblocks, but not explicit user blocks. This is a helpful, albeit inaccessible way to defray some of the problems associated with
blocking Tor users carte blanche.

Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, concerns or suggestions about these changes!

–
Andrew Garrett
Contract Developer
Wikimedia Foundation

en.wikipedia.org and others have seen a rash of abuse coming via Tor in the form of account creations with abusive names and such; this is taking up a large chunk of CheckUser and oversighter time and effort, which is apparently not too fun.

It looks like the current TorBlock settings don’t generally restrict various actions to a logged-in user when accessing through Tor; is there any objection to tightening this up to restrict edits, account creations, etc via Tor except when the account is explicitly excepted?