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., mzmcbride(a)en.wikipedia.org) 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