Ricordisamoa wrote: >Il 09/11/2014 18:33, MZMcBride ha scritto: >> Marc A. Pelletier wrote: >>> But there is also a great heap of anecdotal data that shows that having >>> to provide an email account increases the barrier of entry to users >>> signing up. So, there's a tradeoff. >> Eh, I think the anecdotal data (such as Facebook's and Google's hundreds >> of millions account registrations) suggests that e-mail confirmation is >> not a huge barrier to entry for legitimate users. > >I think both Facebook and Google have enough staff resources to deal >with spam, and they could even let bots create fake accounts as long as >they don't harass other users, just to let the accounts counter increase. >We can't afford that.
I'm not sure what you mean by can't afford that. What specific behaviors are we trying to prevent? Account registration alone isn't really a problem on MediaWiki wikis, just as it isn't a problem on Facebook or Google. The system scales. But if the accounts are registering and then spamming (creating new pages, making bad edits to existing pages, etc.), that's a real problem that we should try to solve as efficiently and cleanly as possible. Volunteer time is definitely precious. >>I think calling this issue a sacred cow is a bit overblown, but requiring >>an e-mail address would be a violation of our shared values. We strive to >>be as open and independent as possible and requiring an e-mail address is >>antithetical to that. If anything, we could provide e-mail address >>aliases (e.g., [email protected]) for our users as a side >>benefit. > >What about case-sensitivity of user names vs email addresses then? This is tangential, but... we should fix usernames to be case-insensitive. And we should support login via e-mail address. And we should (properly) support a display name field, in my opinion. Hopefully, in time. :-) In addition to better heuristics, as Robert suggested, we could also focus on tasks such as <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T20110>, maybe. Using AbuseFilter to trigger CAPTCHAs seems like it would either be a really great or a really terrible idea. At least making this functionality available as an option to potentially try seems worthwhile. MZMcBride _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
