I assume the amount of LTA-related proxy vandalism and abuse has increased

I am not sure about this assumption. It would be great to have some data on it. For example, we can see the number of blocks drop off when ST47ProxyBot goes offline in March:

and the rate of reverts stays about the same

as do page protections

@Novem_Linguae for this task, my suggestion is that we solve it via T354599: [EPIC] Provide IP reputation variables in AbuseFilter, especially as there is some work underway now for that feature as part of FY2024-25 WE4.2 work stream. If we then find that the AbuseFilter approach is not sufficient, we could look at achieving this task in a different way.

I certainly have felt like the bot's absence has had a negative effect on Wiki. One example is, during my NPP work, I patrol redirects. Every day this last week or two I'm finding at least 5-10 unreviewed redirects as the result of caste / clan related articles being redirected by IPs which have often ended up blocked as proxies by the time I find the redirect. I bet I'm missing quite a few as well with other editors marking those redirects as reviewed, whereas I'm reverting the BLARs which typically have very misleading edit summaries. Definitely some edits in contentious areas taking place that might not have otherwise.

@kostajh, FYI, the files you've linked to are currently showing as restricted.

edit: not any more :)

In T380917#10359516, @Hey_man_im_josh wrote:

I certainly have felt like the bot's absence has had a negative effect on Wiki. One example is, during my NPP work, I patrol redirects. Every day this last week or two I'm finding at least 5-10 unreviewed redirects as the result of caste / clan related articles being redirected by IPs which have often ended up blocked as proxies by the time I find the redirect. I bet I'm missing quite a few as well with other editora marking those redirects as reviewed, whereas I'm reverting the BLARs which typically have very misleading edit summaries. Definitely some edits in contentious areas taking place that might not have otherwise.

Ack, thanks for this. We will hopefully have some mechanism in place to allow for mitigating actions from anonymous proxies and proxies by name via subtasks of T354599: [EPIC] Provide IP reputation variables in AbuseFilter.

In T380917#10359546, @A_smart_kitten wrote:

@kostajh, FYI, the files you've linked to are currently showing as restricted.

edit: not any more :)

Yeah, sorry about that!

$wgBlockOpenProxies

This is indeed a feature in older MediaWiki: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgBlockOpenProxies (removed in T56597). A number of related settings still exists in master version of MediaWiki, such as $wgEnableDnsBlacklist and $wgProxyList (which provides indirect support of third party open proxy list). See also T76301: Remove all proxy blocking functionalities from mediawiki core

Note in Wikimedia it is much better that proxies be globally blocked.

@Novem_Linguae can we mark this as stalled while Trust and Safety Product Team is working on shipping T354599: [EPIC] Provide IP reputation variables in AbuseFilter? If we find that AbuseFilters using IP reputation data are not sufficient for this problem, we could think about a dedicated extension.