Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Admins and patrollers/Allow viewing of edit filter logs for IP ranges

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Allow viewing of edit filter logs for IP ranges

  • Problem: Administrators doing anti-vandal work on (at least) the English Wikipedia are increasingly blocking the /64 range when faced with vandalism from IPv6 addresses, reflecting the practice of many ISPs of assigning those ranges to a single user, as long as it can be found that this is the case for the /64 range in question. But while it is also common to review edit filter logs for an IP address in the course of assessing the severity of the vandalism or disruption (most importantly, whether the user has been warned by the filter that they are risking a block should they continue), the filter logs can only be reviewed for a single IP at a time. This makes it difficult to determine whether a /64 rangeblock, or even any block, would be warranted for a particular vandal for whom only the edit filter logs are available
  • Proposed solution: Make it possible to view edits on the /64 range for any IPv6 address whose edits are caught by an edit filter. Or at least give filter creators the option of allowing that (I can see that there might be situations where you might not want anybody doing that, or, at least, not just any admin).
  • Who would benefit: Admins who could more efficiently and effectively prevent damage to the project, and editors who could contribute more productively without having to revert vandals or, especially, the LTAs that the filters are primarily meant to deter and warn about.
  • More comments: Possibly this could, maybe in the future, be applied to the /24–/30 ranges on IPv4 addresses if it is considered necessary. Maybe we should also allow the option of being able to see the relevant ranges with a link from the Contributions page (similar to how the basic reporting template for WP:AIV now displays a link to the /64 for any IPv6 reported to the page) as well; currently one must manually enter the range value desired in the browser's URL window after the IP address. But that might make a better separate proposal.
  • Phabricator tickets: phab:T256823
  • Proposer: Daniel Case (talk) 05:03, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Currently, it is possible to search for ranges only on Special:Contributions. There are even more views that would benefit from such a feature: Special:Log (phab:T146628, phab:T188690), Special:DeletedContributions, Special:AbuseFilter/test (phab:T257420). Maybe a way to make it work for any similar view could also be made.
Yet, there is the ongoing IP masking initiative that will probably soon change patterns of anti-vandalism efforts regarding IP's. --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 16:44, 4 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Admins will, I understand, still have the ability to see IPs. And won't they be assigned unique on-wiki identifiers à la vanished users? They could still be searched that way by patrolling users? Daniel Case (talk) 03:21, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think they will. But I'm not sure either what queries will be possible (reformulating your second question). --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 13:54, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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