Forum:SH:Re-enabling the ability for IPs to edit the wiki

Sometime in the recent past, although I’m not sure when, Wikia disabled the ability for people to edit this wiki unless they have a confirmed e-mail address. That means, by default, you have to be a registered user, and therefore anonymous IP edits cannot edit content pages. Take a look for yourselves by signing out and trying to edit an article under your IP – you won’t be able to.

A small albeit fair amount of our wiki’s activity has come from IPs in the past. The great thing about Wikia wikis is that you don’t need to register an account if you don’t want to. You can’t become an administrator here without an account, nor can you vote or anything like that, but if editing and creating articles is all you want to do then more power to you. Unfortunately, that ability is now gone.

The reason for this, as I’ve been told by Uberfuzzy from the Wikia Community Team, is that it was put in place to stop the vandalism issues over the summer. Wikia says that it’s stopping a lot more than one vandal, but if it was put in due to the vandalism over the summer then it’s fairly obvious that it was put in because of one person: Babylon 8, the banned vandal that constantly creates new accounts that typically feature my name and some sort of other obscenity. We won’t get into the specifics of that, though.

So because of that, I take issue with this. Virtually all of the vandalism on SWF over the summer was from Babylon, and we're perfectly capable of dealing with that and other rare instances of vandalism when they come along. We have multiple administrators that can block vandals, plenty of users who are capable of reverting any vandalism, and then two bureaucrats with CheckUser rights. Disabling edits from IPs, which directly affects our wiki's level of activity, is an unnecessary tool on a wiki that doesn't have a large amount of vandalism anyway.

What I’m asking you now is that you sign your name below as sort of a “petition” to say that we don’t want this, and we’re perfectly capable of dealing with the rare vandalism that comes our way. We don’t need a feature like this which disallows people who don’t have an account or don’t want an account from editing here. Will this get Wikia to remove the tool? Maybe not, but this will at least tell them that we don’t want it.

'''This is not a “bash Wikia” thread. Please keep such comments to yourself. You know who you are and you know what I mean. =P'''

So yeah, if you agree that we don’t need this, please sign your name below. - Brandon Rhea  (talk) 21:56, October 27, 2009 (UTC)

Save Darfur!/Stop the War in Iraq/End the bailouts!/Remove this feature!

 * 1) Brandon Rhea Alliance Starbird.svg (talk) 21:56, October 27, 2009 (UTC)