I can only plead to fellow monks to judge posts by quality no by (presumed) author.

Otherwise iff really a technical solution was needed in the future I'd rather suggest lowering the number of downvotes needed to hide a post from the public.

See also RFC: Hide Very Bad Answers From Visitors

++ to judge posts by quality no by (presumed) author -- I definitely agree with that sentiment.

To me, RFC: Hide Very Bad Answers From Visitors doesn't seem to have been as effective as it was intended... or monks are considering posts for reaping without allowing the hide-very-bad-answers to take effect.

I think we have enough measures to handle this.

The need for your plea in the first case, and the number of considerations of bad anonymous posts rather than letting them get de-emphasized properly, leads me to believe that the measures aren't sufficient, or aren't being used properly. Hence the impetus for my PMD.

Further, that doesn't address the other aspect: the "no, I'm the other anonymous monk" issue for following discussions. And a non-reversible, non-personal, but somewhat-uniquely-identifying hash seems a good way to solve that problem.

The latter problem has actually bothered me almost since I first arrived here, but it was never strong enough to be worth suggesting. But now that I've realized that the same solution will also help with the other issues I brought up, I thought it was worth discussing.

Techies tend to look for technological solutions for problems, but IMHO this is rather a social one.

Though discussing an identifier per IP may be worth it in general, I'm sceptique here.

IMHO evolutionary pressure will only push abuse into other patterns, like VPN tunnels or throw away accounts.

So please forgive me if I'm not deepening this discussion any further.

For me it's just another variant of feeding in this asymmetric war. :)

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

I'd rather suggest lowering the number of downvotes needed to hide a post from the public
• Re^8: console graphics Reputation: -2 (+3 -5)
• Re^2: Regex Expression to filter email for Barracuda Email Appliance Reputation: -2 (+4 -6)
• Re^2: Mojo app running IIS CGI Reputation: 2 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^4: AnyEvent - sequence of async operations without recursion? Reputation: -2 (+4 -6)
• Re^2: cgi web page always 'Loading' Reputation: 1 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: Renaming all files in a directory Reputation: 6 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^4: finding the correct integer Reputation: 0 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: mod_perl on apache works when symlinked to one directory but not to another Reputation: 9 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: Running a perl 5.8.6 CentOS 6-compiled app on a CentOS 8 platform Reputation: 4 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: Counting fields from database Reputation: -1 (+2 -3)
• Re^2: Instance of 'use lib' won't accept relative path Reputation: 0 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: YACC rules to regex rules ? (UPDATED) Reputation: 2 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: Looking for alternative for IPC::Shareable (or increase size) Reputation: 0 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: binding operator Reputation: 0 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: RFC -- Evolving Perl: a Decision Theory Approach to the Challenges of Perl 7 Reputation: 5 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: Second background process is pausing the gui Reputation: 3 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: Parsing a large html with perl Reputation: 7 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: (Ab)using the Regex Engine Reputation: 2 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: Why a regex *really* isn't good enough for HTML, even for "simple" tasks Reputation: 1 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: Perl Unpack Cobol Binary File and Fields Reputation: 8 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: best way to read and save long list of words Reputation: 4 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: 500 SSL Negotiation failed in perl version 5.6 Reputation: 2 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^4: Mojo - Prepare cached query Reputation: 4 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: Mojo - Prepare cached query Reputation: 4 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: Mojo Lite - Invalid JSON Reputation: 5 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^3: "print" of nonexistent element is actually altering a hash Reputation: 3 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: Perl code to format the text file by inserting tag in blank line Reputation: 0 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^4: Help with converting HTTP::Request to Plack::Request Reputation: 4 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: Greetings and salutations | sudo Reputation: 2 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^5: Why not perl have raw/native type Reputation: 3 (+10 -7)
• Re^2: Why not perl have raw/native type Reputation: 5 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: Positions of certain tokens in syntax tree Reputation: -1 (+3 -4)
• Re^4: Perl Feels Good Reputation: 1 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: Quote about thinking of those who come after you. Reputation: 0 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: If Perl 5 were to become Perl 7, what (backward-compatible) features would you want to see? Reputation: 5 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: Cutting text from the end of the file and adding it to the top Reputation: 7 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: Help with my crap Reputation: 1 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^5: Undef value in Template Toolkit Reputation: 0 (no significant downvotes)
• Re^2: Portable way to determine if two names refer to the same file? Reputation: 3 (no significant downvotes)

HINT: You needed to log in and vote to collect those votes. The gods can identify you now ...

Good night! :)

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

I understand the desire for an anonymous account -- it lowers the barrier of entry for one-off questions, and it probably helps with GPDR.

FWIW, here are two related discussions 1 2 from the SQLite forum and the forum of its related project, the Fossil SCM. Ever since they moved from the mailing list to a forum hosted and developed in-house, anonymous posting was allowed, subject to pre-moderation. Some people did't like anonymous posts and replies, but so far the ability to post anonymously has been judged useful enough to stay. I realise that the more "democratic" PerlMonks as a whole has to pay somewhat bigger price for that, since the SQLite community never sees what their moderators don't approve; on the other hand, every time I post anonymously, an SQLite forum moderator gets an extra piece of work.

I post both here and over at the SQLite forum when I have a spare minute or two and want to feel helpful. This total absence of barriers between me and helping someone is great; I would like to preserve it, if possible.

P.S. Yes, the "tough beans" anti-spam feature is annoying, but it does beat the alternatives.

Note that Janitors can unconsider a node... I do feel your pain though, but I'm not at the point where I feel we should eliminate Anonymonk account... yet.

A hash of the (say) /24 part of their address (and/or the IPv6 equivalent) would probably be a decent compromise being fuzzy enough to reasonably smear things likely from the same source. I'd be most surprised if there were someone commenting from the same block as the infamous one. If the hash were stable and made it into the CSS somehow as an attribute or class that would be even nicer.

I ran an ISP as the senior global network engineer for a decade, and I am against blocking based on IP block or in most cases address level. I've always believed that any risk of collateral damage is too much risk.

IPs can be spoofed (although that's admittedly become much harder in today's age), people forget to remove the restriction, admins can mistype the prefix and wipe out an address space way larger than they intended (yep, I've done that one... blocked most of Australia once by blackholing way too large a block, and took me a while to sort out WTF because the problem didn't crop up for a few days after the change).

Oh no I didn't mean block as in block the IPs, but as in hash every IP in the same /24 net block to one identifier so that e.g. someone bouncing their cable modem probably would still hash to the same token.

The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.

are you sure?

are you sure?

No. And that's part of my point.

During my drafts of that post, I thought I had said "it seemed" or "it feels like"; I should have left that in. But the argument between infamous-or-maybe-some-other-anonymous-poster and the AM whose gut reaction is to label many posts as belonging to the infamous (even when, IMO, the post doesn't carry enough infamous DNA to decide one way or the other) feels to me like it dominates the anonymous scene, to the point of annoyance.

to distinguish between [Anonymous Monk]s in a thread, brand 'em

Re^13: to distinguish between [Anonymous Monk]s in a thread, brand 'em