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Anonymous user registration on Bulbapedia

Disable anonymous user registration?

  • Total voters
    22
I think we could also use a better system of admin contact. I'm on AIM a lot, and while 'pedia is on one of my RSS feeds, it updates every 15 minutes, not constantly, so I can't see vandalism in-progress.

I don't think having vandals will tarnish our reputation in the least. Invitation only makes us seem more elitist than we already are.
 
Indeed. Some reforms need to be made.

Meantime, Pie (your randomly-generated password is in your Yahoo inbox) and TSS_Killer have been conferred administrative privilleges and responsibilities. (Please the read articles in Category:Bulbapedia administration.)
 
All right. I'll give everything a thorough read-through when I get home from school tomorrow - no hurry with anonymous registration turned off, and I really ought to get to that homework I've been putting off this evening...
 
Again, you are exaggerating facts. The top 3 humans + BulbaBot make up approximately 50% of edits by count. Top 12 + BulbaBot make up 80%. 95% by the top 53 + BulbaBot.
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How about statistics for the past couple months?

But I, for one, no longer have the patience to clean up after link-spammers and page-movers and other crude vandals. I am sure the other sysops will run out of patience one day soon.
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Here's an idea I came up with: If human sysops identify the vandals, can't BulbaBot clean up after them? Since BulbaBot is a sysop, it can delete pages created by vandals and the automatic redirect pages created by fixing random moves; any user can revert moves if no edit was made to the original page, and if some edit was - BulbaBot can delete that, to. Any link spam, blanking, link removing, reverting etc. can be corrected by any user.
 
I don't think Bulbabot is that intelligent.

Zhen Lin said:
Tell me, what is so hard about asking for an invitation? Too much pride?
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Security is probably the main thing. What is so wrong with making a thread for it on the forums?

Zhen Lin said:
Bottom line: it is extraordinarily easy to sign up in a MediaWiki system - far more so than most sites on the internet today.
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Yet it won't be when this is sorted out...
 
FabuVinny said:
Security is probably the main thing. What is so wrong with making a thread for it on the forums?.
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That was part of the original proposal. So what is the problem with it?
 
I urge you to read more carefully.

In addition, we are considering allowing users who do not have contacts to request one on BMGf.
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So, I ask you again, what is your problem with the original proposal?
 
Zhen Lin said:
Actually, I imagine they do not, since the largest user of MediaWiki by far is Wikipedia, and they, of course, do not suffer the same types of problems we do.
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I'll check what Hebrew Wikipedia does about it. (The e-mail address of the sysop who just blocked me there is [email protected])
 
Some user has been doing the same thing at Hebrew Wikipedia. I've found a Page Switcher, a Page Blanker, an Empty Page Maker and a Random Reverter. That last one got Bar Ilan University autoblocked this morning.
Again, I believe there to be a sysop at Bar Ilan University. This time it is a teacher in the Math department, Prof. Vishne. This user blocked the later two of the sockpuppets of the user who seems to be the same as the one we call Link Remover.
 
Zhen Lin, is it that logging into Bulbanews requires a different set of username and password?
 
The nice thing about keeping the user databases separate is that you can disable registration separately. (That is to say, if we had fully unified user databases, even if we shut down registration on Bulbapedia, one could still register on BMGf, Bulbanews or Archives and hence gain access.)
 
OK, so it seems we're deadlocked on the issue with a marginal win for the yes vote.

I will hear final arguments now, and a decision will be made on Sunday.
 
It's 9 and 9 presently.

The entire idea of a Wiki is open-registration, and despite all its problems I think it's worth the difficulty to allow anyone who stumbles across Bulbapedia the ability to access it. That's the only solution to this problem that's in the original spirit of the project, pure and simple.
 
Eh, like people have been saying, turning it off just defeats the original purpose of it being a wiki. It's almost like turning off registration on a forum because someone is spamming it (which never lasts - they do get tired of it after a while). I know it's a lot of work to undo what the spammer has done, but putting up a wiki comes with those kind of responsibilities. Not everything can be perfect - there will always be someone out there who will want to mess up something. Luckily on wiki, you just undo their edits. Forums have mods to deal with spammers, the wiki has a whole database of people who can easily undo them.

Like I said before, turning it off for a period of time will probably cause the spammer to give up on trying and move on to somewhere else (unless of course he reads this thread...) If he comes back, then just undo his edits and turn off the registration again. That's what the mods/people in high power on the wiki (or whatever they are called) are for. You can't just turn it off forever because of one series of incidents.
 
Ah, but you see, my observation of this contributor base tells me that... they are utterly lazy, apathetic and unwilling to clean up messes, with only a handful of exceptions. The responsibility lies not with the hosts, it lies with the contributors.

Most of all, it lies with you, the advocates of open registration. I fully expect you to put your actions where your words are. Unless you are willing - do not repeat this argument. I have already heard it and I acknowledge its validity.
 
Helpful little remainder to everyone, Zhen most of all : BMG is not a democracy.
 
I was refering to the various posts about "split vote" et al.
 
Please note: The thread is from 18 years ago.
Please take the age of this thread into consideration in writing your reply. Depending on what exactly you wanted to say, you may want to consider if it would be better to post a new thread instead.
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