Talk:Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Multiblocks

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Thanks for your interest in discussing or following discussions on the Multiblocks wish. We endeavor to respond to you within 48 hours.

Currently, we are looking for feedback on our approach to the wish. Also, if there are any community experts on the subject matter you want us to speak to, please leave a comment or email steiwikimedia.org.

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• Thank you for the update, seems like a good start. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:26, 17 October 2023 (UTC)
• Thank you for the update. There's not much for me to respond to except to say that I hope the work continues. It would help if a loose timeline could be provided: will the completion of the work be best measured in months or years? Firefangledfeathers (talk) 18:36, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
• I think the only comment I have: IIRC, partial blocks are limited to blocking a user from 10 pages only. With the addition of multiblocks, this seems like an unnecessary limit (because I could block someone 10+ times...). Izno (talk) 04:26, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

  @Xaosflux thank you for your feedback.

  @Izno thanks for the observation. Pinging @MusikAnimal (WMF) to see if he can confirm this for you.

  @Firefangledfeathers thank you for feedback. I will get back to you about the timeline in the week of 13 October November. Have a good weekend.

  STei (WMF) (talk) 16:13, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

  @Firefangledfeathers, we are looking at completing this in months, worst case 6 months. Thanks for your patience. –– STei (WMF) (talk) 10:10, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

  This is a good point, @Izno! Related, phab:T350485 is about establishing a limit on the total number of blocks per target. I feel like some sort of limitation on the pages for partial blocks should also be imposed for the same reasons. That is, the very rare case of people trying to stress the system, or otherwise misuse this. I.e. blocking an IP range from 1,000 different pages – that's a block log no one wants to look at or "maintain". It seems in most cases you'd just rather move to a sitewide block.

  Are we aware of use cases where we need more than 10 pages per partial block? I suppose for IP ranges it's conceivably of use, but with multiblocks on top of it, you should have sufficient control even with the 10 page per block limitation. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 17:57, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

  I've bumped into cases where I would have appreciated being able to go over the 10 page limit. I suspect most other admins have as well, at least the ones who use partial blocks. I agree that with multiblocks this should not be too much of an issue. I can see a desire to want to organize blocks in one topic area versus another, which is where this limit might still be annoying.

  I don't know what the general practice is w.r.t. "this is not worth our time managing this many blocks/pages blocked". Might be an open question. Izno (talk) 18:10, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

  Both multiblocks and partial block restrictions will be loaded into memory in various places. For permissions we need to load all blocks associated with a user/IP and all related restrictions. For Special:BlockList we need to load all restrictions associated with the displayed blocks. Somewhere around 1000-10,000 total objects is probably safe and fast enough as long as things are implemented efficiently. I said to the team previously that 1000 blocks per target is probably fine, although I was thinking of single objects. If each block has 100 page restrictions then you might run into trouble. How about 50 max pages per block and 20 blocks per target? -- Tim Starling (WMF) (talk) 23:01, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

  I think that's a good start for the high side and definitely on the other side of the line for "should just be removed or have a soft remedy that they have to figure out themselves", since blocking someone from the entirety of Eastern Europe topics is surely not in the realm of feasible (without category blocks, which have their own downside[s]). If necessary for performance reasons we can do research at a later date to see how much multiple partial blocks are being used. Izno (talk) 02:07, 22 November 2023 (UTC)