This issue appears to have been solved (permanently?) by blocking a large number of otherwise-unused IP addresses.
This issue is currently being was at one time discussed at the ANI.
One day, I intervened in some vandalism going on at the article Vrlika. An anonymous IP was deleting relevant Serb-related content and sometimes adding unsourced, nonNPOV stuff about "Serbs aggression." The vandal began to hit several related articles, and I started reverting the vandalism all over the place - it's not like doing so is difficult or too time-consuming. The pages have been on and off page protection, and even my own user and user talk pages (and subpages) have been vandalized, as well as a short spat of vandalism of all pages that my talk page linked to. In order to make sense of this, I'm going to compile some info here about the vandal. Other users are welcome to contribute to this, because I hope it helps us keep this vandal from carrying out his vandalism. This is intended to be a helpful tool in stemming this ongoing (seemingly unending) problem.
Articles Vandalized edit
Here are the articles the vandal has targeted. I've sorted it to separate the ones he regularly vandalizes from those he has only vandalized once or twice, and at the end the ones that do not relate to his general POV (for a few days, he seemed to seek out my rvv's in unrelated articles and he'd then repeat whatever vandalism I'd reverted - links to diffs are provided, since he isn't so easy to find in those pages' histories). At the bottom is the userspace vandalism.
Known IPs edit
Here is a list of IPs the vandal has vandalized from, that I've located. I'll try to keep them sequential.
- Primary IP range 195.29.96.x - 195.29.105.x and 217.68.80.50
- 217.68.80.50 (talk · contribs) - this this user has a substantial number of edits prior to the other 195.29.x.x IPs, but has the same editing/vandalism pattern. If I had to guess, I'd say they are either two vandals working together, one with a fixed IP the other with a dynamic one, or one vandal who's hopping around a bunch of spoofed (or otherwise mimicked) IPs in the 195.29.x.x range with his real IP at 217.68.80.50.
- Related, reasonable to presume it's the same user
- 90.192.175.184 (talk · contribs)
- 195.29.109.186 (talk · contribs)
- Bizare incident
- 71.246.122.83 (talk · contribs) - the 195.29 vandal has repeatedly vandalized my userpage by, of all things, posting barnstars (or chunks of barnstar code). This user posted one at Talk:Krka (Croatia). On the other hand, it may be unrelated - this user's contributions are all barnstarring (mostly in articles, or on his/her own talk page).
- Most likely unrelated, but involved heavily in similar disputes
- 89.172.193.192 (talk · contribs)
- 89.172.193.65 (talk · contribs)
- 89.172.198.53 (talk · contribs)
- many similar IPs (I won't list them all, I don't think this is necessarily the same user)