untitled.txt

Thanks Derric for the push and summary.

Proposal:

The following proposal tries to address the general problem of allowing
edits from a proxy.

* Require an account to edit via proxy.

* Allow creating accounts from proxies but globally rate limit account creations
  from all proxies (to once per five mins? or some data driven number that makes
  sense).

* Tag any edits made through a proxy as such and put them in a queue.

* Limit the amount of edits in that queue per account (to one? again, look at
  the data).

* Apply a first pass of abuse filtering on those edits before notifying a human
  of their presence to approve.

* Rate limit global proxy edits per second to something manageable (see data)

This limits the amount of backlog work a single user can create to how many
captchas they can solve / accounts they can create. But I think it's enough a
deterrent in that 1) their edits aren't immediately visible, 2) if they're
abusive, they won't show up on the site at all, and 3) it forces the act to
premeditated creation of accounts which can be associated at the time of an
attack and deleted together.

Rate limiting account creation seems to open a DOS vector but combining
that with the captcha hopefully helps.

Attribution / Licensing:

As a consequence of requiring an account to edit via proxy, we avoid the
issue of attributing edits to a shared IP.

Sybil attack:

Or, as it's called around here, sockpuppeting. This seems to be solved by the
reputation of the account. Is it newly created? What's the edit history? The
quality and content (both subject matter and stylometry) of those edits? An
IP is only one metric along those lines, and a dedicated vandal that manages
their compartmentalization well over time can probably be successful without
a proxy today.

I'm not sure how CheckUser works but I'm guessing it's sophisticated enough
to make those correlations.

Class system:

This makes a set of users concerned about their security and privacy trade off
some usability but that seems acceptable.

A reputation threshold for proxy users can be introduced. A concrete proposal
still needs to be fleshed out here but after, say, a substantial amount of edits
and enough time has lapsed, the above edit restrictions can be lifted from
an account. Admins would still have recourse to block/suspend the account if
it becomes abusive.

Blacklisting:

Anonymous credential systems (like Nymble) are interesting research directions
but the appropriate collateral to use is still unsolved.