Last modified: 2008-03-24 20:51:49 UTC
Today on en:, an anonymous user (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/193.207.168.126) vandalized a number of pages in a fairly short period of time. Judging from the pattern of edits (year articles in sequence from 1950 on), this person probably used a script to add the offending image to several articles per minute - faster than regular users could notice and revert. This continued until an admin blocked the user. By restricting the number of edits a particular anonymous user can make in a given amount of time, we can slow vandalbots' progress to the point that human users can keep pace. While there are legitimate uses for anonymous bot edits - interwiki links are often added en masse to year and date articles by anon bots - this throttle should hinder the progress of an automated vandal so that human users can keep pace.
The example given was mostly editing at 1-3 pages/minute which is too slow to restrict. One problem with address-based filtering is that the origin may be a proxy serving a large group.
*** Bug 4849 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 9992 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This has been done a while ago; see defaultsettings.php.
