It's not just spammers, but there are also legitimate concerns about people using new accounts to troll, vandalize, or even to just dick with stuff because they don't know what they're doing.
Further, we'd like some evidence that an account was created in earnest by making them actually make edits or post in the forums or something — this prevents them from creating a bunch of accounts and then simply letting them age until the newbie block expires.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"My experience with Wikipedia says this rapidly becomes an arms race, but there is some benefit to having to make them do a little work.
We may also want to think about ways to make it easier for our users to watch what's going on — some proportion of contributors tend to want to help out in that way.
A brighter future for a darker age.
And that would be fine if that's what they wanted to do, as long as they don't make a mess of the pages along the way.
The point isn't to prevent spammers and vandals from getting on the wiki. That's impossible. What we do want to do is limit the damage they can do — preferably without unfairly hampering legitimate new tropers. Human supervision will always be required for this. But let's say we put a 5 edit per hour/10 per day restriction, and allow edits of no more than 5 lines. Much easier to undo 10 5-line edits than fifty or whatever.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
It's not hard to copypaste something and return what was said, though. I'm not sure it's really necessary, though.
You know, as long as we're keeping recent edit histories, adding a method for mods to quickly revert an edit should be a doable thing. Like reverting to a previous version in Git
(for lack of a more widely familiar example).
Or, for that matter, reverting your own edit, if you somehow made a mistake.
edited 28th Jun '11 2:19:08 AM by KylerThatch
This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...It's on the tech table. Eddie only has so much development time to give to the wiki. The real problem with a revert button is how to deal with edits made after the reverted one.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Idea I just had: if we're restricting some kinds of edits by new accounts, what about a limit of multiple large changes per hour, like 10 or so? There wouldd probably have to be an article size minimum, so that people editing stub pages and troper pages wouldn't accidentally get caught and not be able to make any more large changes, but it'd be great for catching trolls that like to blank multiple pages.
"The fact that your food can be made into makeshift bombs alarms the Hell out of me, Scrye." - Charlatan@Fighteer:
I'm sure it's been suggested somewhere else that Fast Eddie get a couple of volunteers to help with all the coding, but I'm not going to dwell on that.
There's a reason I suggested it be primarily a mod feature.
Beyond that (as an additional option), a regular troper account could, at most, revert their own most recent edit(s), assuming nobody else has made another edit after that. That way, a potential vandal can't revert someone else's changes, and if they make their own edit to the page, a mod can easily revert that.
edited 28th Jun '11 3:51:30 PM by KylerThatch
This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...We're starting to wander a bit here, but I think the reversion system that Wikimedia uses is pretty good in terms of the way it works for the end user.
The code and its implementation is a living nightmare, though. I'll just say "coded by committee" and you can let your imagination take it from there.
My contract to be in Wisconsin is winding down. I should be able to get a better solution in place for us fairly soon.
Goal: Clear, Concise and WittyI agree with the email system over the one account per IP over others. Nearly every website I know of uses email to track posts. The one account per IP doesn't work because even ISPs uses ranges of IP Addresses and change them often for their paying customers. I know because I've seen the log of it happening on my own PC!
edited 16th Jul '11 12:51:35 AM by GameGuruGG
Wizard Needs Food Badly

"The change does not decrease the length of the text significantly. "
Only problem with this is things like removing natter or moving content to an appropriate subpage like YMMV would not be considered good edits.
My name is Addy. Please call me that instead of my username.