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Posted by: Somey

Well now, THIS is interesting, especially to anyone who's been accused of sockpuppetry in the past.

I was just on Uncyclopedia - I'm on it now, in fact - and it thinks my IP address is 216.224.121.143, which geolocates to Aptos, California (I'm actually in Des Moines, Iowa, and my IP as reported by every other site is always in the 68, 71, or 72 ranges... no need for any more detail than that).

So I checked "my" contribs, and sure enough, "I" had made a bunch of edits within the last several hours, the most recent being to Uncyclopedia's article on Cricket. So I tried making another edit to that article - a constructive one, corrections and so forth - and sure enough, it was logged as coming from 216.224.121.143! MediaWiki thinks I'm posting from California, with the same IP as some totally different person! It's like I've been given a proxy IP without even asking!

I just wish I knew how to reproduce this... I'm using Firefox 7, maybe that has something to do with it?

Just to prove this for the Wikia folks, I'm going to try making another edit - this time to User_talk:David_Gerard, alerting him to the existence of this topic.

(Two minutes later...)

Oops, too late, they blocked the IP address. Apparently every AnonIP in the system was being assigned that address... Still, it was fun while it lasted!

Of course, that proves that it had nothing to do with Firefox... It has to be a MediaWiki bug, for it to affect every AnonIP in the system.

Posted by: Somey

Update: It wasn't just all AnonIP's that were blocked when 216.224.121.143 was blocked, it was every user in the system!

So, they unblocked the IP, and I guess someone did something that fixed it for about five minutes, but now it's back to everyone being on that same IP again. This has been going on for well over an hour...

I have to assume that someone is hacking Uncyclopedia somehow, and causing this to happen. I wonder how they're doing it?

Posted by: LamontStormstar

Or somebody working on the site messed up.

Posted by: Cobalt

It isn't an error, its a feature!

Posted by: Jonny Cache

All that stuff about geolocation is total nonsense. I used to click on that dnstuff utility from time to time and it typically gave me locations that ranged from 500 to 1500 miles from where I really am. Plus, a person working in a Washington cybercafe whose company uses a Southern Bell trunk line will get reported as being somewhere in Texas. Many such non-journeys are possible.

Jonny Cancun -- I Wish !!!

Posted by: blissyu2

I actually had that happen to me on Wikipedia at one point too. At one point, Wikipedia incorrectly listed my IP as being 59. something, while I was still logged in as 230. something. 3 edits just appeared from an entirely different IP address. This IP address that was as a result of a false match then ended up being listed incorrectly as my sock puppet.

Posted by: Nathan

*blank look* Firefox 7, you say? Are you sure about that? Maybe IE 7, but Firefox is at 2.0.0.6 and version 3 is in alpha.

Anyhoo, yes, I mentioned in another thread that it's probably best not to take those geolocation tools very seriously. I've gotten different IPs that geolocate to completely different places than where I live. My current IP now geolocates to Ottawa (damn) which is correct but the one I had before I moved geolocated to Toronto.

Posted by: Somey

Oh right, sorry! That should be Firefox 2, the latest version available at the time (it's set to auto-update).

I probably got confused because I'd only just switched to Firefox a couple of weeks earlier... At least that's what I'm admitting publicly, anyway.

Posted by: jch

Resolves to ap8.sjc.wikia-inc.com

It appears to be a gateway server. On many high-traffic sites, your traffic goes to a gateway server first, then it connects to the actual site for you and sends along the XFF (X-Forwarded-For) information, saying what IP is actually sending the information.

If the XFF header is damaged or doesn't get sent during a gateway malfunction, all the edits that are sent through that gateway appear to come from the gateway itself.

On Wikipedia, they've blocked the secure.wikimedia.org gateway before and caused similar problems.