Bookmarked Eight Colours by Alex Schroeder
This seems a nice visual way to see who’s editing a wiki, without showing (or storing) host names or IP addresses: turn the IP number into a small ‘flag’ of different vertical color bands. Then it is immediately obvious if a range of edits come from one editor or from multiple. Look at this image for what I mean.
If you’ve looked at Recent Changes on this wiki, or on other Oddmuse wikis, you might have noticed that some of the edits are from people identified by a four-coloured “flag” of some kind. If you select the “flag” you’ll see that every colour belongs to a number. What’s up with this?
Alex Schroeder
My code also uses Perl’s B module to compute the hash. It’s part of the compiler backend for Perl. It provides a hash function which is always available, and which returns a different hash for the same string once you restart Perl. The interesting benefit to me is that this also confounds long-term tracking: after a while, the code used for your IP simply changes.
Thank you Alex, for that addition. That makes sense, as in my experience it’s about the most recent edits in a wiki mostly (like the 150 last edits or so). Having a ‘glanceable’ way, like the colour coding, to get a feeling for edit patterns is very useful, but it’s not needed to have it tied to the full history of someone on that wiki.