Hi,

At least twice I found AbuseFilters that prevented people from testing
extensions that I develop or posting feedback about them on MediaWiki.org
and the beta testing sites (such as
http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page ).

By their nature, the extensions I am working on have a lot to do with
different (human) languages, and these AbuseFilters relied on the
assumption that on these sites everything is supposed to be in English, and
whatever is not English is probably spam.

One of them filtered out the whole Russian alphabet, so the extension
couldn't be tested by Russian-speaking users. Another one didn't allow
submitting Flow posts that don't have a sufficient amount of English words
from users who have less than 6 edits, so users who have a lot of edits in
their home wikis, but no edits in mediawiki.org, and who want to post in
languages other than English are blocked. Luckily, one of those people
pinged me directly, but I don't know how much useful feedback was filtered
out and lost.

I acknowledge that spam is a problem and that there may be a better
solution for multilingual testing and feedback than doing it all on one
site English site, but till there are solutions for this, please consider
non-English languages when defining AbuseFilters on our tech sites.

Thanks for understanding :)

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
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