Talk:No open proxies

I DON'T KNOW WHY I KEEP SEEING I HAVE BEEN BLOCKED WHENEVER I OPEN WIKIPEDIA

I keep receiving this message that I have been blocked since last month. What is the issue? Why was I blocked? I haven't go against any policy here.

I am just tired of all this.

Please, Open that account for me Mccoy Jonas (talk) 16:54, 10 July 2025 (UTC)

I too have been blocked for some reason. Did you get a reply? Webruce (talk) 14:41, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

Potential typo?

"Please do not place a local unblock request on your user talk page, they are reserved for local blocks. Local administrators are unable to remove global blocks"

I think this is supposed to be "Please do not place a global unblock request"... Angkun-ane (talk) 10:04, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

@Angkun-ane: No, that's not a typo. Global proxies are often blocked both globally (which does not affect Meta) and on Meta, leaving Meta talk page access intact. That means open proxy users can only edit their own talk pages. The policy says such users should not place {{Unblock}} on their talk pages, because Meta unblock requests are handled by Meta admins, most of whom are not stewards and thus can't modify global blocks. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 11:06, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

Policy needs revisiting - both ill advised and ineffective

This policy is a travesty and needs revising on multiple grounds:

1. It's ineffective. Right now I am adding this by virtue of using a VPN's residential IP forwarding mechanism. Which, while exposing an IP in this scheme to Wikipedia's retribution, is exactly how the technical implementation is as effective as a sieve at keeping the water out. The policy has no effect on bad actors, who can easily use mechanisms like I use, those attempts just get hidden inside requests coming from residential IPs and spread out, making them harder to detect for Wikipedia. In essence, Wikipedia makes it harder for itself to detect bulk abuse because it comes in spread spectrum.
2. It makes Wikipedia a clearing house for people's home IP addresses, allowing cross referencing by any member of the public and can (and almost certainly has) been used to out individuals in various ways.
3. The people who most need the privacy are least able to go through the process of getting an exemption.
4. It restricts editing from places like libraries, cafes, and other places that implement 100% VPN or who pipe through hosting provider IP addresses. Are contributions with high-quality citations that aren't just links to blogs or online content wanted? Then libraries are exactly where you want to encourage edits from.

I'm aware of the ability to gain exceptions, but in my case, while I consider it a necessity in order to protect my privacy, it is not a technical necessity and I do not qualify for an exemption. No one should have to.

I would support remediation in the following ways:

1. Remove the policy and replace it with login-required to edit from VPN/TOR/hosting addresses.
2. Modify the exemption policy to allow exemptions for anyone requesting. Essentially a human CAPTCHA mechanism.
3. In conjunction with the above, edits from VPN/TOR/hosting addresses can be rate limited (one per day/two days/week) regardless of login or exemption status for a trial period. A certain number of valid contributory edits required to remove the rate limit.

The above, with rate limits, would make the system so painful to abuse (requiring people to curate edits and accounts for a long period of time in order to set them up for abuse) that it would effectively restrict abuse yet be little impedance for legitimate users. Kfitzner (talk) 18:29, 7 January 2026 (UTC)