Guild Wars Wiki:No open proxies/Renew

Trial Period
If concensus is reached on the talk page; before officially making this a policy, there must be a 30 day trial period in which to see how the new system works. A Support and an Oppose system should be used (similar to how an RfA works) on the talk page during the 30 day trial period in order to reach a final decision.

Policy
Open or anonymising proxies may be blocked for any period at any time. While this may affect legitimate users, they are not the intended targets and may freely use proxies until those are blocked. No restrictions are placed on reading the official wiki through an open or anonymous proxy.

Proxies are left open due to deliberate or inadvertent configuration or because hackers have changed the configuration. Non-static IP addresses or hosts that are otherwise not permanent proxies should typically be blocked for a shorter period of time, as it likely the IP address will eventually be transferred or dynamically reassigned, or the open proxy closed. Once closed, the IP address should be unblocked.

A list of open proxies should be provided; an administrator should review and then renew the list every so often.

It is recomended (but not required) that a bot be used to get the task of blocking open proxies done more quickly.

Rationale
Although the official Guild Wars Wiki encourages anyone in the world to contribute, such proxies are often used abusively. Since MediaWiki (the wiki software) depends on IP addresses for administrator intervention against abuse, open proxies allow users to completely circumvent administrators. The use of scripts or bots allow malicious users to rapidly rotate IP addresses, causing continuous disruption that cannot be stopped by helpless administrators. Several such attacks have ocurred on Wikimedia projects, causing heavy disruption and occupying administrators who would otherwise deal with other concerns.

This policy is known to cause difficulty for some editors, who must use open proxies to circumvent censorship where they live; a well-known example is the government of the People's Republic of China, which sporadically attempts to prevent its citizens from reading or editing Wikipedia. Chinese readers who wish to edit Guild Wars Wiki should read advice to users using anonymizing proxies to bypass the Great Firewall.