On 6/19/06, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Steve Bennett-8 wrote:
On 6/19/06, Guettarda <guettarda(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Don't forget the accounts which exist to
prevent impersonation in one's
main
language - names with capital I's to mimic L's and Cyrillic characters.
Deleting these would just open things up for abuse again.
This sounds like a hack.
Can't we just add them to a "do not create"
list of usernames?
That would *be* the hack: simply creating the account and blocking it uses
the current facilities to perform the task; in fact blocking is optional
if
the person creating it is the one who might be spoofed since they would
hold
the password.
Of course, getting back to Kat's point - there are a lot of reasons you
need a user account just to read Wikipedia - I tried accessing Wikipedia
through AOL (not logged in) just to see what it was like once. Once and
never again. It was a horrible experience. Ever page you clicked on had an
orange bar informing you that you had messages. Click on it and it takes
you to vandalism warnings. And, since you have a new IP address with the
new page, yet another orange bar pops up, leading you to a NEW set of
vandalism warnings... Things may have changed since I tried it, but based on
that experience you NEED an account just to read Wikipedia (without too much
annoyance) if you are on AOL.
Ian