Ben McIlwain wrote:
Raphael Wegmann wrote:
Hi,
as everybody probably knows here, userboxes made vote-stacking und campaigning easy, since one can easily find the "right" people to vote on a subject.
Maybe a technical solution to this problem is possible. What if a bot substitutes all userboxes on the user-pages? Maybe it's even possible to somehow "tag" a template, so it is always substituted? This could be used on warning templates as well.
It's honestly really funny that you should mention this today, because if you check the pywikipediabot CVS logs for yesterday, you'll see that I committed a change to the template bot that allows an arbitrarily large number of templates to be substituted or deleted from an arbitrarily large number of pages all in a single command.
Though I'd say it's a good idea to run that bot, I agree with JohnTex, that campaigning shouldn't be prohibited per se. Spamming thousands of users, who happen to have a certain userbox on their userpage is a different matter.