Per-journal ban of anonymous comments from specified IP

[azurelunatic]

Title:
Per-journal ban of anonymous comments from specified IP

Area:
comments, bans

Summary:
Allow bans within a journal or community for anonymous comments from specific IP addresses, while allowing other anonymous comments, and also allowing logged-in comments from that IP, and not affecting that IP's ability to comment in other journals from which they have not been banned.

Description:
Allow a journal owner to prohibit a certain IP address from making anonymous comments in their journal. All people using that IP address would be prohibited from leaving an anonymous comment in that journal, even if they were not the individual who had originally offended; if the individual who originally offended were to connect with another IP address, then they would still be able to comment anonymously until the new IP was banned or anonymous commenting was disabled. The ban would only affect the journal on which it was set, and would need to be set separately in a community to which the user posts, or in a second account belonging to that person. The ban would only affect anonymous comments; someone connected from that IP address could comment while logged in.

There are valid reasons in assorted journals to allow anonymous comments, but one anonymous commenter not playing by the ground rules can spoil the fun for everyone.

Individuals being jerks do not really fall under the oversight of anti-spam efforts: it's not a commercial activity, it's not automated, and it's not the site's responsibility to get in the middle of personal disputes even if one of the parties is acting anonymously.

Giving the journal owner the power to ban anonymous comments from the offending IP would at least stop the journal owner from having to clean up after that particular IP, with a greater precision than disallowing any and all anonymous comments.

This is not going to stop a particularly determined jerk who knows how to get a new IP address (contrary to popular belief, most residential internet customers are not assigned a single IP address that is theirs forever and ever: power cycling your cable modem usually lands you a new one; there are also anonymizing services, et cetera). In a battle with a determined jerk, you may wind up blocking hundreds of IP addresses individually before either they give up out of boredom or you give up and block all anonymous comments.


Pros:
May allow some degree of have-your-cake-and-eat-it too with regard to anonymous comments.
Could be reasonably effective in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing.
Users who know what they're doing could theoretically use it in connection with a blacklist more severe than the ones Dreamwidth uses
Less work cleaning up after one or two characters who are attempting to spoil things.
Potentially fewer non-spam items in the antispam team's queue
Being competitive with self-hosted blogging solutions
Would not block logged-in users


Cons:
The technically naive believe that an IP address is magical and 100% accurately identifying, and this could help further that belief.
D is against it (see con #1)
Innocent parties who have a) got the same IP assigned to them, and b) are trying to anonymously comment in the user's journal would not be able to do so.
Incredibly trivial to evade if a guilty party knows what they are doing.
As demonstrated in the "M. the Webmaster is still unpopular" scenario, a ban list can be ridiculously large and still ineffective against unpleasantness; a ban list cannot be increased beyond a certain point or else it will start to affect site performance.



Terms of service enforcement: ToS should not even attempt to enforce ban evasion from anonymous IP-based banning, as this is laughable; it would be provided as a preemptive cleanup convenience only, and to halt anonymous abuse, one should screen or disable anonymous comments entirely.

Poll #928 Per-journal ban of anonymous comments from specified IP

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 44

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
20 (45.5%)

Should be implemented with changes.
3 (6.8%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
15 (34.1%)

(I have no opinion)
4 (9.1%)

(Other: please comment)
2 (4.5%)

Comments

[cesy]

Con #1 could be partially counteracted by an obvious warning whenever you add a ban explaining what it won't achieve.

Also, of course, you would have a maximum number of IP addresses you could ban, which should cover the second half of the last con.

[(Anonymous)]

I hate this idea so much. Banning by IP address, given its limitations as a form of identification, is not a fair or reasonable action to take, and punishing the innocent to deal with a problem is ridiculous.

This would be and ineffectual and clumsy way of dealing with a problem, and would reflect extremely poorly on DW.

[yvi]

Hmmm.

Hmmm.

This is a really difficult one.

I think mainly I am against it because it creates a false sense of security. Disabling anonymous comments for a few hours is so much more effective than banning an IP-address. But I can also see how that is annoying.

I can totally see both sides and still my gut feeling tells me 'no'. I'm sorry, I can't explain it further.

[yvi]

Or maybe a 24-hours ban? That would get rid of problems 3 and 5.

[susanreads]

I'm not sure about this. I'm definitely against banning an IP address as such, because it might be a public terminal. The option suggested might be useful on a temporary basis, to see if the person gives up and goes away, but it wouldn't be as effective as blocking all anonymous comments, which you can also do on a specific post where you're having the problem. I think I'm persuaded by yvi's false-sense-of-security point.

[tzipwich]

I sort of like the idea of having maybe a 72-hour IP address ban or something like that.

[sara]

Well, as usual I'll go out and be in the minority: I think it's a good idea. I've had good results with IP banning on a self-hosted WordPress install. Doesn't come up much, but it's handy on the rare occasions when nothing else will do.

(Many if not most people, frankly, do not know enough to reset their IP. Or are on work or school machines where they don't have the capacity to do so.)

[azurelunatic]

There was a similar discussion a while ago in LiveJournal suggestions that made me examine my reasons for supporting the public-terminal argument in discussion of a similar or the same feature, and I ultimately decided that I could no longer wholeheartedly believe in that.

This assumes that two or more people are going to use a) the same public terminal to b) comment anonymously on c) the same journal, and d) one of them will have offended the journal owner enough to make them ban that IP.

[azurelunatic]

Since the theoretical journal owner is already able to do things like make an access-only journal with one public post, and say "Comment to be added! IF YOU ADD ME WITHOUT COMMENTING, YOU WILL BE *BANNED*!!!" ... and have comments to their whole journal set to access-only, I do not see how banning individual IPs from anonymous comments on single journals is any worse.

If someone turns off anonymous commenting completely because of abuse originating from one IP, how is that any more fair, reasonable, effectual, or graceful? It punishes all anonymous commenters to that journal, not just anonymous commenters originating from one IP.

I would be fine with a notice saying "The journal owner has disallowed anonymous comments from this IP address. Please sign in to your Dreamwidth or OpenID account" or some such thing, to indicate that a) it is the account owner's decision, although Dreamwidth would have given them the tool, and b) they can still comment when signed in.

[azurelunatic]

What are the consequences of someone getting lulled by that false sense of security?

They're obviously worse if the user also buys into the misconception that banning stops someone from reading.

[azurelunatic]

I like 7 days better. 24 hours is not long enough to assume someone's got bored.

[yvi]

What are the consequences of someone getting lulled by that false sense of security?

Mainly "OMG I banned them why are they still commenting here and why doesn't DW prevent this? DW sucks!"? Then again, there's the "OMG why can't I ban someone by IP? DW sucks!"

*sighs*

I never said my gut feeling was rational. I think I'll just change to 'no opinion', as I do think I am fine with either way.

Though if there is a timestamp on the ban I think 7 days is too long. Or maybe an option with 1-x days drop-down with x being something between 3 and 10?

[(Anonymous)]

Um, I don't see the first scenario as equivalent at all. The journal owner is setting the conditions in advance and users can choose how to respond. That's not the same as suddenly banning an IP address at some point, without any way for the person commenting to know they've been (unfairly) banned until they go to comment. *shrugs* It feels utterly different to me.

It punishes all anonymous commenters to that journal, not just anonymous commenters originating from one IP.

Exactly. What it doesn't do is pick on some poor random individual who gets caught up in this without (necessarily) having any way to know how or why, and potentially feels like they've done something wrong (which, frankly, to someone who does not know much about IP addresses and the like is how that message you write comes across!). It should be all or nothing as far as I'm concerned. If someone is seriously worried enough about anon comments, they should turn them off altogether. If they choose to allow them, they should deal with individual users, not IP addresses.

This just feels awfully icky to me.

[azurelunatic]

Fair enough.

I still like the idea in general (and if you're someone I know, which I suspect you are, I still <3 you). But your points are good.

[zvi]

I really don't think we should do enable solutions that don't really work, as IP banning doesn't really do.

I also think we should minimize instances when the site "fails" to work for not-logged in users without explanation. In this instance, if we explain to the anonymous user their IP address is banned, a fairly trivial google search will tell them how to fix that. And if we don't tell them, we get support requests asking what is up.

[zvi]

Could easily happen if any of our comms turn into ONTD or Fandomwank.

[azurelunatic]

lol_meme is already up and running, so I catch your point.

I was thinking more about smaller journals.

[exor674]

Giving more control to users of their space is always good.

[ciaan]

I like this.

[nostariel]

I like it. Most people, including trolls, are kind of fail when it comes to computers and teh interwebs. Sure, an IP banhammer won't stop all of them, but nothing else will either. Why not add another layer of defense? Even if the benefits are only psychological (and I don't think they are) I'd argue that that's still a good enough reason to add it, assuming the time & effort to code it and the load on the service is small enough.

And it'll make anonmemes more fun. That's good enough for me, really

[(Anonymous)]

Um, I'm not sure who you think I am, but I'm pretty sure you don't know me, let alone <3 me! *g* We've certainly never communicated before!

And I can see why logically someone might want this, I just don't think it'll actually work!

[triadruid]

Eh. I can see the appeal, but it's really sketchy to IP-ban anyway (I'm looking at you, AOL). I don't understand the comparison to "I banned them, why are they still reading me?!?" in the comments above.

I'm not really against it, but I don't think this is a very effective solution to the problem. Stopping anonymous comments is easier, because anybody can make an account if you have to turn them off because of some troll.

[miss_s_b]

I am getting determined spamming from a set IP address this morning, and this function would REALLY help me out. I have so far deleted and marked as spam 55 comments on one entry...

[miss_s_b]

So I'm now into my second week of spam from the same set of IP addresses, over 1000 comments, and really REALLY pissed off with it now.

I turned anon commenting off completely for a while, but that's not a sustainable solution for me, as I really need to have my blog open to people without DW accounts for comments.

If DW is not going to allow banning of IP addresses that's fair enough, but please at least make it easier for people to batch-delete spam - the ability to delete all screened comments on an entry without having to manually select each one when they span several pages would be great; "select all" and then the ability to unselect the odd one that's not spam would be even better.