Changing summary. Switching to feature request.

There is no such thing as allowing a block of IP addresses. Special:Blockip
just block stuff and that should usually be enough :)

MediaWiki is hardcoded to disallow blocking of block that are more than
a /16 . You can still hack the code around to allow something bigger ;o)

lucanos wrote:

Thanks Ashar,

That's what I was looking for - why is MediaWiki hard-coded to limit the block
size to /16 ? Why not allow larger blocks that that?

robchur wrote:

(In reply to comment #2)

Thanks Ashar,

That's what I was looking for - why is MediaWiki hard-coded to limit the block
size to /16 ? Why not allow larger blocks that that?

To stop sysops who don't understand how it works from blocking massive subnets
and causing serious problems.

michaeldaly wrote:

Could this be changed to allow any range for sysops who _do_ know what they're doing? Perhaps with a parameter in LocalSettings.php so the wiki admin can limit the damage or not (e.g. wgCIDRlimit = 16;)?

I have a lot of problems with spam via several companies within the Asia Pacific Network and see no reason why I shouldn't be able to block nnn.0.0.0/8 without having to enter 256 separate blocks of nnn.nnn.0.0/16. If I had one single valid user in these ranges, I'd deal with them separately.

Added $wgBlockCIDRLimit in r58377. Other request (exempting specific IPs from a range block) is not done, though.