Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Admins and patrollers/Stop-time blocks/Proposal

• Problem: Blocks are currently all running time ... they are set, and run the designated time, at the end of which they expire.

  This does not always deter vandals/disruptors blocked for the first or sometimes second time, as they can simply wait out the block, then come back and start right up again, perhaps getting away with more this next time. Eventually we have to block for longer amounts of time, which isn't fair, really, to other people on those IPs who might want to edit constructively or create accounts. Especially on ranges.

• Proposed solution: Allow an admin to set a block to be tolled or, as we put it in the sport I officiate, "stop-time" (i.e., the normal arrangement for sports played in clocked time periods): Time on the block would run only as long as the IP or user was actively reading (and in the latter case, logged in) the wiki in question. By "actively reading", I mean clicking on links, viewing new pages, something that could easily be determined technically (I don't know how, it's not my department, but it seems from what I do know that it would be possible to monitor this and distinguish between a user looking at different pages (for what would be varying, yet realistic, amounts of times for a human to have looked at them) and a user trying to fool such a block with a script that just keeps refreshing the same small page over and over every second).

  These wouldn't have to be long periods of time, maybe 50 hours at the most (perhaps you'd want to go longer at places like educational institutions, where there's bound to be a higher amount of page viewing) to get their point across. It would make the magnitude of what they have done abundantly clear to those affected.

  We could also set these in multiples of five, independently of the clock.

  Since theoretically this could make a 20-hour block indefinite if the editor just gives up trying, admins (who would be able to see how much wikitime remains on the block) would of course have the discretion to lift these blocks if they had gone on for far longer than they would reasonably be expected to.

• Who would benefit: Everyone. Productive editors would have less vandalism/disruption to deal with, admins might have to do less blocking and the admin work that comes with that, and prospective editors who just happened to pick the wrong school to go to would face less obstacles in making the kind of trial edits that could get them started.
• More comments:
• Phabricator tickets:
• Proposer: Daniel Case (talk) 03:55, 5 February 2023 (UTC)