Re: Wiki Abuse

On 01/14/2013 02:47 AM, Kinkie wrote:
>> Can we grep the wiki data to locate those other user accounts?
>
> Yes, I found out that we can. It's 129 users total.
> Amended plan: create a page to explain the account policy; post to
> squid-users; preserve those 129, the editors, the admins, and whoever
> answers from squid-users; remove everyone else with no other warning.
>
> Eliezer, Alex; you are right that it'd be nice to warn each individual
> user personally, but:
> - it's 28k of them. Out of those, I estimate 8k to be real (and the
> estimate is VERY generous), at least 20k are drive-by spam attempts
> - many of the users have probably fake or spoofed email addresses
> (remember, no address verification is done), so the mail would be
> unexpected to them, and even if only 10% answered, it's an excessive
> amount of work.
> - recreating an user account is a trivial matter (even though it now
> requires an admin's intervention)
>
> I will keep the old user accounts around in case they are needed.
>
> Does the plan fly with you guys?

If I understand your plan and estimates correctly, you want to
inconvenience a few thousand of legitimate users, and we could expect a
few hundred of those users to come back at you so that you can manually
re-enable their accounts? In this case, I hope your estimates are wrong
both because I do not think we should inconvenience so many without a
very good reason, and because I do not want you to spend so much time on
handling those manual cases.

Can we remove non-editing users that did not register to receive any
notifications? If yes, how many users will be left after that?

Thank you,

Alex.
Received on Mon Jan 14 2013 - 18:12:02 MST