Host Blocking

Can Host/IP be allowed/denied access?

This is a basic anti-vandalism measure, which allows you to block repeat offenders from accessing your wiki.

There are some kinds of vandals who are new to the wiki concept, and are responding by seeing if they can get away with adding obscenities. This is a natural reaction to wiki technology (by people who are perhaps a little childish) In these cases it's a good idea to just revert their edits manually, and try to rehabilitate them. The hope is that they will quickly realise the technology is robust to that kind of thing, and that it's more fun to make good contributions.

If a vandal keeps coming back and making a nuisance of themselves, then using this feature to block edits from their IP address, or hostname, is a good idea. The feature should only be available to the wiki administrator (or a group of trusted power users)

If you need to block a vandal from 222.240.54.73, the first thing you should do is look up the ISP and block the entire range. These days, all the vandal will have to do to evade your block is to request a new IP from his provider. That's why you have to block the entire range. Use the whois command, and you'll find that you need to block 222.240.0.0 - 222.240.255.255.

Similarly, if you find a vandal from 218.76.34.78, you'll find that you need to block the range 218.76.0.0 - 218.76.63.255.

Your wiki should allow the blocking of ranges, or the blocking of patterns (regular expressions), in which case you would write the above as ^222\.240\. or ^218.76.([0-5]|60|61|62|63)\..