Motivation

For Temporary Accounts who are LTAs or repeated abusers, the communities may want to block them indefinitely. However, this will clog up Special:BlockList since temp accounts only last 90 days. To mitigate this, we should introduce a new default for blocking temporary accounts.

Background

This has come up a few times in community discussions:

• Feedback from dewiki: Currently MediaWiki:Ipb-default-expiry applies for temp accounts – this default for regular accounts is set to infinite on some large wikis, which is not needed for temp accounts given that they expire after 90 days. Of course it wouldn’t be harmful to block temporary accounts indefinitely (and admins can of course also select something else than the default option), but having the right default for temporary accounts would be ideal in order to avoid clocking up Special:ListBlocks. Just applying MediaWiki:Ipb-default-expiry-ip to temporary accounts wouldn’t be a solution, because that default is still needed when blocking IPs / ranges used by LTA.
• Privately raised by a Korean admin: Currently, there is some confusion among administrators on the appropriate block duration of the temporary accounts. With the legacy IP blocking, indefinite blocks were reserved to proxies to prevent blocking other users on the same network. To the best of my understanding, with the introduction of temporary accounts, stored cookies are used and thus this is not really a concern unless auto block is used. The blocking policy on the Korean Wikipedia has not been amended yet to include temporary accounts. In my personal opinion, I believe that the default block expiry settings would be greatly appreciated, especially on "block-on-sight" LTA users.
• From idwiki: is it okay to block temporary accounts indefinitely (in case of sockpuppet or LTA case)?

Acceptance criteria

• A new default block expiry option exists as MediaWiki:Ipb-default-expiry-temporary-account similar to https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Ipb-default-expiry-ip
  • Also see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Block_and_unblock#Default_block_duration_options
• Default duration: none/blank