Last modified: 2008-10-07 20:50:15 UTC
Somehow related to bug 8707 "Support global (crosswiki) blocking", but technically not identical: A crosswiki usernameblacklist would be extremely helpful as there are more and more targeted account creations with 'very' abusive names all over the different Wikimedia projects, specifically using real names combined with severe personal attacks, sometimes with private data made public (note: potentially legal issues). Typically a user creates accounts on projects that are in a language the victim neither speaks nor monitors. Once user pages for such accounts were created, they show up at the top of search results very quickly (due to Wikipedia's generally high ranking). And usually - contrary to pages in other namespaces - user pages rarely get deleted anywhere if the local admins don't understand the meaning of the account names – in some cases the user pages were also not created by the user itself, but actually by "welcoming" users or by users placing silly block notes on the pages ... So this is more an issue of preventing creation of specific account names and of unwanted page indexing (through search engines) rather than one of simple log or listusers entries. If this abusive account and page creation is done on a bunch of projects, the search results for a user's real name can be completely "occupied" by these insults for weeks (or months). And the removal of all such user pages from the Wikimedia projects and from the search engines needs time. The negative effect by this kind of "vandalism" is fairly high compared to the needed effort to reach it therefore. And the popularity of this method of attacking real persons highly increased in the last months as far as I can tell, so making a crosswiki usernameblacklist possible - at least for Wikimedia projects - would be very helpful (I suggest it should be editable by stewards only). Thanks in advance!
There is now a global username blacklist inside of Meta's title blacklist <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Title_blacklist>. It just requires the use of the <newaccountonly> attribute. Marking as resolved fixed.