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Prevent administrators from blocking themselves?
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Description

Author: happy.melon.wiki

Description:
Allowing admins to block themselves tends to result in them doing it, almost invariably by mistake (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/?oldid=359971907). Are there any legitimate usecases where we'd want to allow admins to block themselves?


Version: 1.17.x
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz23408

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 21 2014, 11:06 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz23408.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

bugs wrote:

(In reply to comment #0)

Are there any legitimate usecases where we'd want to allow admins
to block themselves?

Political reasons (i.e. "protesting" some action) or because they don't want to edit for a while, so they want to "enforce a wikibreak".

Abigor wrote:

It sounds to me that when we make something to prevent people to block them self we are trying to fix a human bug, not a mediawiki bug but a human error, people should double check before blocking.

I have seen people block them selfs because they where also involved in a edit war or to stop discussions about actions that they did. I think its a rather good function that people can block themself.

bugs wrote:

Maybe a warning message would be good? Or like a checkbox that comes up? "Are you really sure that you want to block yourself?" I think we have something like that when we move pages to titles that already exist.

I've blocked my self before to test what the block message looked like (I think due to someone complaining it was broken, can't remember for sure, was a while ago). Since it is really easy to unblock one self, I don't see any harm, and probably sends a good message to new admins to read the instructions before hitting the shiny button.

Abigor wrote:

I just tested it on my wiki-farm thats running 1.17svn but I cant unblock myself, I guess somebody changed the block function...

In that case it could be good to have a warning before blocking yourself.

happy.melon.wiki wrote:

(In reply to comment #5)

I just tested it on my wiki-farm thats running 1.17svn but I cant unblock
myself, I guess somebody changed the block function...

That was me, in r64228. You now need the 'unblockself' permission to do that. Admins should have it by default, though...

In that case it could be good to have a warning before blocking yourself.

My thoughts entirely.

If your changing it so they can't unblock them-self without the user right, you should also do blocking themselves.... It seems strange to only do one half of the equation.

happy.melon.wiki wrote:

(In reply to comment #7)

If your changing it so they can't unblock them-self without the user right, you
should also do blocking themselves.... It seems strange to only do one half of
the equation.

Why would some wikis need the ability for admins to self-block and others not? That's what userrights are designed to accomodate.

(In reply to comment #8)

(In reply to comment #7)

If your changing it so they can't unblock them-self without the user right, you
should also do blocking themselves.... It seems strange to only do one half of
the equation.

Why would some wikis need the ability for admins to self-block and others not?
That's what userrights are designed to accomodate.

For those with less intelligence?

happy.melon.wiki wrote:

Warning implemented in r85025.