<p>I noticed this today <a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/322928#map=11/39.7724/-104.9424&layers=N" rel="nofollow">around Denver</a> (not <em>all</em> of the notes there, but a lot of those have these junk single letter replies).</p>
<p>Is there an IP address we can block related to this vandal? That's a question only sysadmins can answer. <a class="user-mention" data-hovercard-user-id="147741" data-octo-click="hovercard-link-click" data-octo-dimensions="link_type:self" href="https://github.com/tomhughes">@tomhughes</a> said we are storing IP addresses of commenters, so my question is: did this vandal stick to a reasonably fixed IP address? and could we block it? Presumably we do do some general web server IP blocking already for heavy traffic abusers.</p>
<p>I appreciate that's a short-term fix, because they <em>may</em> just swap to a different IP address, and if they don't, other future vandals surely will begin a cat n mouse game that way, but... seems like a first thing to try if we didn't already.</p>
<p>(I think conventional web security wisdom is that you shouldn't play IP address blocking games, but if we're serious about allowing anonymous text contributions in the long run, then we may need to go down wikipedia's "soft security" route, and so maybe it <em>does</em> make sense to start doing some policing by IP address)</p>

<p style="font-size:small;-webkit-text-size-adjust:none;color:#666;">—<br />You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.<br />Reply to this email directly, <a href="https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/1543#issuecomment-406597915">view it on GitHub</a>, or <a href="https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABWnLcffQzlMd2QawyfwNJrXPRBlq-fdks5uIdh5gaJpZM4NcYws">mute the thread</a>.<img src="https://github.com/notifications/beacon/ABWnLdBerpyvJqmfqdiLso8BJDodt-Frks5uIdh5gaJpZM4NcYws.gif" height="1" width="1" alt="" /></p>
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