Equally, there isn't any consensus against this. I received his message; I didn't mind at all.
If it does become a problem, then it may be wise to act then - but I don't think there is one at the moment. Ram-Man's proposal wasn't unreasonable, and due to the number of people it needed to reach (i.e. far more than the usual 100 people that vote on most polls), it wasn't necessarily a bad idea to choose talk pages over a post on the Village Pump or equivalent.
Frankly, unless this sort of thing becomes a regular occurrence, I don't see any need for action at all.
-- ambi
On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 01:20:49 -0500, Fennec Foxen fennec@gmail.com wrote:
Hello. I'd just like to draw attention to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ram-Man#Spambot a discussion about whether Ram-Man should be permitted to use rambot to send unsolicited bulk messages (soliciting participation in a "dual-licensing drive") to thousands of user-talk pages. The bot is currently blocked indefinitely, pending the resolution of this issue.
Ram-Man seems to believe that an implicit community consens exists and approves of his use of the bot in this fashion. Currently, he claims to have "over 70% support" of users who responded to the message, although I believe this figure to be skewed by the "users who responded" part. I therefore would appreciate it if otherwise uninterested individuals provide Ram-Man with a more concrete measure of the level of community support which exists regarding this message.
Others have expressed concerns regarding the precedent which this sets for distribution of unsolicited user-talk messages, and suggest that a more concrete policy be formed to deal with this form of userpage spam. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l