Timwi wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
The worst offenders we've discovered in
recent times are the edit counters
-- web based scripts that send requests to the servers often lasting
minutes, with unrestricted parallelism. We were very tempted to block them
all. We would have blocked them for much less if we weren't afraid having
an angry mob of hundreds of Wikipedians obsessed with edit counts,
descending on our door.
Amazing: You were very tempted to block them because they were causing
too much traffic, but it still didn't occur to you to simply add the
count to the Special:Contributions page, thereby peacefully rendering
them obsolete?
You're confusing development with system administration. Development takes
time. Sometimes a situation develops, and a solution is required at the
system administration level, while development is in progress. At the
time, the user_editcount field had been recently introduced, but it
clearly wasn't sufficient to provide the information users were looking
for, as Simetrical notes. Other options for development were apparent, but
the expected development time was too long.
It's always going to be a tough decision, when it comes to limiting,
suspending or denying services. But it would be irresponsible to just let
site-wide performance descend to glacial speeds while development is in
progress.
-- Tim Starling