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Posted Nov 29, 2014 23:34 UTC (Sat) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266)In reply to: Previous time by misc
Parent article: The "Devuan" Debian fork
Wikipedia has it: it's the autoconfirmed status (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed). By itself, it's not enough; it's trivial to create sockpuppet accounts in advance. Wikipedia has several more advanced tricks to fight sockpuppets; autoconfirmed is aimed at preventing "drive-by" vandalism, which unfortunately is not the case we're facing here.
Also, on Wikipedia there are lots of things that non-autoconfirmed users can do immediately after creating their account. The restrictions on them are only for the most disruptive actions (page moves, which can be a pain to undo; editing "semi-protected" pages, where "semi-protection" means "editable only by autoconfirmed users"; and uploading images, since vandals love to post human anatomy pictures in inappropriate places). You are suggesting preventing new users from posting for a double-digit number of hours. That's enough for a new user who created an account because he believed he had something insightful to say to give up on the site.
Vandal-fighting is a balancing act; your suggestion goes too far in the "strict" direction.
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Posted Nov 29, 2014 23:43 UTC (Sat)
by josh (subscriber, #17465)
[Link]
Posted Nov 29, 2014 23:43 UTC (Sat) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
The downside of semi-protection with a delay on posting by new accounts: once a sockpuppeteer knows that it's in use, they can simply register a raft of accounts and save them for after the delay. So it works against casual trolls, but not against the more dedicated.
It works best in conjunction with a mechanism to detect and ban sockpuppets (and in particular, with correlation of accounts by IP).
In any case, this seems like overkill while we're primarily talking about a small handful of trolls; LWN does not operate at the scale of Wikipedia.