Requests for comment/Username locks

The following request for comments is closed. There are no currently available technical means to perform automatic locks and given the seriousness of this it is best avoided. This proposal failed to garner sufficient activity or interest to be enacted in any acase. Snowolf How can I help? 20:18, 17 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]


I would like to propose that spam usernames that promote some entity be automatically globally locked as well as blocked. This came up as an issue on IRC where a few editors expressed concern about the chances of a promotional username being used to advertise for some company across multiple wikis, even if the username was blocked on the English Wikipedia. For example, if a username bearing the stamp of [Greencorp Technologies] was blocked on the English Wikipedia, what's going to stop them from spamming the same advertisements across other wikis? And we have to wait until it happens before requesting it at SRG; I think it's much better for them to be locked by stewards, even if the spam occurred only on one wiki, once the block is set in place by sysops. That way, it gives more compulsion to the user to change his/her username into something that doesn't represent an organization. :| TelCoNaSpVe :| 19:29, 31 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I was under the impression that if an account were blocked on its home project before it migrated to other projects, it would be unable to create new accounts on other projects anyway? Perhaps we'll have to test this. Kylu 20:20, 31 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'm told that there is a related bug to this issue, and that my assumption was based on a broken mechanism. n/m pls. Kylu 02:25, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]