[Mediawiki-l] Re: Never delete users !

Wed Oct 12 22:17:27 UTC 2005

> On 12/10/05, Jani H. Lahtinen <jani.h.lahtinen at nokia.com> wrote:
> > ext Rob Church wrote:
> >
> > >The advice in the subject line is correct. Users should never be
> > >deleted from the table for another reason; you leave a lot of messy
> > >references to them lurking about which really does confuse the hell
> > >out of the software.
> > >
> > >MediaWiki does not support the deletion of users, and likely never will.
> > >
> > >
> > >Rob Church
> > >
> > Does this not provide a fine attack against Mediawikis: make a bot that
> > generates and register users. After some trillions of random users added
> > the wiki is on its knees.

On 10/12/05, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why would that be the case? Users are merely a row in a table in a
> database, as far as the software is concerned, and databases are
> designed to handle data...
>
> I'm not sure what you think could be exploited.

Just like there's no way to officially delete old revisions and
there's no way to delete users, this is the sort of bloat that
unsettles a lot of people.  I think I'd have a serious issue with a
bot making various random names, filling up slots that are potentially
usable by regular users, and which could bloat my database more than
I'd like.

Yes, trillians of users would take up a bit of space.. these are the
inconveniences which force me to download an ever increasingly-large
dump to back up my database..