Banning a troll who changes his IP address- Also, how do I find out a users' IP address?
I don't know anything about changing an IP address, so I don't know how hard it is. I recently used $wgAccountCreationThrottle to only allow one account to be created per IP address per day, but I know he just changes his IP address since I check the box for blocking it each time I've banned one of his accounts. I haven't actually tested this configuration yet, since account creation has been prevented since I've implemented it.
Could anyone explain to me how hard it is to changed an IP address, since I'm wondering how much this will slow him down.
Also, I'm wondering if I could use a range block to keep him from editing with any new accounts he creates. That would probably only work if new IP addresses can only be created within a certain range.
Where do I go to find the IP address of a user?
First off, if you have problems with vandals who keep coming back I'd recommend installing the checkuser extension. That allows you to view a user's IPs, and which accounts are linked to an IP.
Vandals and trolls who come back with different IP addresses can do so with relative ease, through two major ways. The first is rotating through IPs in a "range", which can be done a variety of different ways. These are easy to deal with since you can block a range of IPs (see here, and use a rangeblock calculator found here). The second way is the use of an open proxy, which is a lot harder to stop since there are a lot of them out there and they are not usually part of a range. In cases of very bad vandalism with proxies, you could disable anonymous editing and account creation temporarily.
I've had anonymous editing restricted since I set up the wiki; I wanted to have people log in and have accounts, to create a more personal community. I also currently have account creation blocked to anonymous users.
I just installed the checkuser extension, and I got an error when I tried to use it. I could try checking what it was again.
When I installed CheckUser, I uploaded the file to the extensions folder, and added the line to the localsettings file. I also gave sysops the checkuser right. Was there something else I needed to do? The MediaWiki version I have is at least 1.16.
You also need to configure the sql database for that one - further instructions are provided on the extension info page. The easiest way for me is the non-command prompt one, since I use Cpanel and can directly access the sql and add the files.
Yep, those are the ones. You'll then need to upload them onto the sql somehow - that depends on what method you use. The extensions page has good instructions on how to do that.
When I click on "download" it just takes me to a page of text. How do I download the files?
You might need to manually create the two pages in the sql thing, and then copy and paste the text into them and save. That's what I needed to do.
All I need to do is copy the text?
I copied the text, and it looks like those files exist, but it seems to say that the table is empty.
