Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 1/4/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
I have yet to see any userbox-facilitated trashing of articles.
I also have yet to notice any userbox-related vandalism. Why do you mention the fact since it has not been suggested?
"Trashing" was not the best choice of word. What I meant was that none of the normal edits of my watched articles by logged-in users seems to have been part of a campaign by users connecting via userbox. User names unfamiliar to me all seem to be editing in good faith, if not always as competently as I would like...
What I have noticed, without even breaking a sweat, is three separate attempts to enlist, by talk page spamming, groups of editors unknown to the person doing the spamming, who has (helpfully for my case) explicitly stated that he's approaching the person in question, *because of his self-identified persuasion*. This is obviously always unacceptable, but here we are providing the pushers with powerful technology to enable them to do so.
People unknown to me are always pinging me on my talk page, trying to get me to look at an article, weigh in on a dispute, relicense all my text, etc.
It's useful to know that there have been three attempts to use userboxes for spamming, so I appreciate your bringing it to the mailing list for attention, and we should talk about where we want this to go. Maybe it's a fad, maybe it's the next step of evolution. At this point it just seems like it's too soon to tell.
Stan