Talk:No open proxies/Archives/2015

Clarifiying what constitutes an open proxy

I find it unclear exactly what constitues an open proxy. The policy uses the phrasing open or anonymising proxies, and it links to w:en:Open proxy which defines an open proxy as one accessible by any Internet user. Would a paid for but otherwise public proxies be considered public? They're not really public in the sense that only a certain group of people can use them, but they are public in the sense that anybody could become a user of them. Would a VPS used as a proxy by just the one person who owns it be against this policy? It would be an anonymising proxy, so by a narrow reading of the policy it would seem so. I would like to propose that a clarification on whether paid for proxies are against this policy be written in, and that the or in open or anonymising proxies be removed if the private VPS is not against the policy. -Cake~talk 19:24, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

I'm going to propose that:

• Open or anonymising proxies be changed to Publically available proxies (including paid proxies), to reflect the actual policy
• That the sentence Proxies are left open due to deliberate or inadvertent configuration or because hackers have changed the configuration. should be removed entirely, as it contributes nothing, and simply leads to more confusion, implying that all open proxies are the result of 'hacking' -Cake~talk 15:59, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

C4K3 Support What you describe is closer to the intent of the rule than the text which you propose replacing. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:03, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Proposed solution to allow open proxies

While I understand that for non-registered users open proxies completely disarm admins, I think you could allow them for registered users, as administrators could sanction their accounts if necessary. This is similar to the behaviour of linuxquestions.org (except they completely disallow viewing pages, which is worse). So, you can continue to allow anyone to read, and allow to edit those with an open proxy XOR unregistered, not both. What do you think? --JMCF125 (talk) 13:56, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

This is already the case, in practice: the exemption is granted very liberally, see No open proxies#Exceptions. Unconditionally exempting all registered users is not possible, because there is no practical limit to account creation. Nemo 21:16, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

In the change I mentioned, accounts could not be created from an open proxy IP. Though I can see what you mean: users creating accounts from their regular IP, and using those from an open proxy IP. So I'll change my proposal. Think of it this way: self-confirmed users (not sure this is the right term, I mean users that did good edits and can edit some protected pages) would have the priviledge of being able to edit Wikipedia from an open proxy IP. What do you think? I can't come up with any possible abuse in this case. JMCF125 (talk) 15:53, 3 December 2015 (UTC)