Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-7645613-20200113032103/@comment-9605025-20200113035920

Darthmufin wrote: Yeah i understand that, but with those websites you mentioned most require you to verify your email before posting yeah? And i think at least Twitter had or has something in place that detects suspicious activity, like you immediately starting a new account after being banned.

... Yes, and so does Wikia. The issue is that multiple people can share one email and one person can have multiple emails. Verifying emails does nothing with regards to identifying who someone is. All it does is provide a means to contact them. Say my email was 100@email.com and I got banned. Wikia bans my email so I cannot make accounts with 100@email.com anymore. Okay. I make a new email account, 101@email.com, and then use that to make another Wikia account. Darthmufin wrote: ...

Again, if i could hide comments without actually removing them to trick the harasser into thinking his comments are staying up, that would probably make him scream into the void till they got bored.

... I disagree. If they think their posts are still up, then they might believe that they are still being disruptive and therefore be motivated to keep going. A lot of vandals do it for the attention. If they think they are getting an audience, they will keep going. Darthmufin wrote: ...

However i don't know what you mean by IP Range. We have an option to " Automatically block the last IP address used by this user, and any subsequent IP addresses they try to edit from" but this does nothing. So far this person has been blocked at least 4 times, maybe up to 6. So what you are using is the IP autoblock. A few things to note about the IP autoblock is that it is only temporary and does not affect registered users. If you want to prevent registered users from using that IP, you need to check "Prevent logged-in users from editing from this IP address".

With regards to IP range blocks, that has to do with the fact that most networks use dynamic IPs. This means that the same device can have a different IP the next time it connects to the network. Let's say your home network has been given 10 IPs. You connect your computer and it gets IP6. You disconnect to take your computer with you on a trip and reconnect it when you get back. Now you computer could have a different IP, like IP1. What a range block would do it block all 10 IPs so that, no matter which one your computer is assigned, you are still blocked from editing the wiki. Of course, you have to be careful with range blocks as you have no way of knowing who you are actually blocking. For example, if the harasser is using a university network and you block the IP range, you would be blocking everyone who uses the network even if they aren't the person you are trying to block.