On 6/25/06, Vojtech Hala <egg(a)matfyz.cz> wrote:
1) The biggest one is that setting the bot flag cleans
the RC page but
doesn't clean the block logs. The robot messes them up so much that they
become nearly unusable.
On enwiki, this is solved by the simple expedient of using indefinite
blocks. These can be lifted by request if it's judged that the proxy
is no longer open. (See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:No_open_proxies.) Thus, no
clogging the blocklists.
2) So many blocked IPs lead to harder server-side
checks performed on each
edit of the wiki.
I wouldn't know whether that's a problem, but I do know that there are
over 60,000 blocks on enwiki, no doubt steadily increasing due to
accumulating infinite-blocked accounts. I wouldn't worry about this,
or in fact anything techy, unless a) I'm told to worry about it by
brion or b) it seems from personal experience to do something
obviously distressing such as, e.g., crash the site.
3) Some "innocent" IPs may get blocked.
Unfortunately unavoidable.
4) The bot and sysop flag should not be combined.
It's probably only a bug
in MediaWiki that allowed us to do it. When you try to set bot flag to
sysop account, the software objects. When you do it in reverse order
(first the bot flag, than sysop) it succeeds. See
http://cs.wikisource.org/wiki/Special:Listusers/bot
that it is possible.
Clever. Stewards were always able to combine the flags, it's just
Rob's MakeBot that imposed the additional restriction, but of course
that has no control over whether the standard bureaucrat extension can
add sysop to any user at all.
5) Time-limited blocks lead to repeating the same
actions and in long time
scale it requires hundereds of block each night. This can be avoided by
infinite blocks.
Yep, that's what enwiki does. Then there's no need for a bot, then,
at least past the initial blocks.
For example integrating a list of open proxies
directly
into the Wikimedia servers instead of blocking by sysops would be a way to
deal with it.
Well, there my knowledge of the situation ends, so I'll leave that to
the devs. I couldn't find a feature request at
http://bugs.wikimedia.org/, which is where they generally go, but I
could easily have missed it.