Whoa! VERY interesting bug! Options

[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.

[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.