User blog:Inferno Pendragon/Category Abuse And IPs

Category Abuse is becoming a major blight on this wiki and it seems the biggest offenders are anonymous IPs, probably because IPs know fine well blocks don't work on them if they are proxies and its a well-known fact most of the unhelpful and trollish edits are done by IPs.. of course some IPs are helpful but this raises a problem.

It seems that as long as IPs are free to create categories they will continue to abuse it and we'll be left with no option but the destroy every category we have - I have noticed certain IPs only exist to spam this site with adding categories (often falsely) to articles already having lots of categories.

Now as an admin I don't have any power to stop this but their does exist a solution in UserRights - stopping IPs from editting unprotected pages - they would be able to create accounts and so forth but this may be seen as too extreme by some.

The question now remains are we prepared to go down that route or are we going to continue this endless battle against the (mainly) IP-based abuse of the categories? forcing us to delete valuable and needed categories which could be remade if not for the IPs that abuse them?

You can argue users do the same but you can talk to users and normally get a response and if needed you can ban a user - as it stands banning does little as they will contribute from IPs regardless.

Now I know this is unfair on those who don't use proxies and want to help but perhaps this will encourage them to create accounts - it may drive some away but in the end maybe its better than the current situation of IPs running amok.