Don't throw around the term 'mental problems'; my little brother is autistic.<p> Erik, it takes no work to type in 'a' for each criterion when signing up for yahoo or hotmail. <p>Erik said:<p> <blockquote> Brion-

Stop giving him the satisfaction of making a big

fuss. Just revert crap

that's crap, and work with stuff that's good (should

there be any). What

more do we need?

First: Lee has banned No-Fx, so this will only be applicable to the next incarnation, should there be any.

Neither option is very appealing. Michael seems to be a person with mental problems, and I doubt he much cares about the existence of other users on Wikipedia at all. He considers it his playground, or maybe an information storage system. Those who try to talk to him are insulted.

Furthermore, it is not easy to determine which of the information he inserts is actual junk. For example, a couple of days ago I noticed that he had changed one on the articles on my watchlist and modified the release date of an album. I checked the date from multiple sources, and the old one was correct. I do not know where he gets his information from, but much of it is quite obviously incorrect. Add to this the personal insult to people like Zoe, on whose user page he put the text "I like oral sex" and pasted the whole oral sex article.

Just reverting everything he writes may be an acceptable solution for the time being, but it's also considerable work, and needlessly spams the server. Every couple of days some newbie will ask why we do it because his edits seem to be acceptable. I would really like to see these matters resolved more quickly and concentrate on writing an encyclopedia. Otherwise I fear at some point we might have 10 or 20 users like him at our hands in the future.

There may be the option of threatening legal action, but if Michael is as stubborn as I think, that will also not really deter him.

...

I should point out that the problem of users

appearing under dozens of

...

names would probably go away if we required an

email confirmation during

...

signup, although that might deter some users from

creating an account.

You have heard of hotmail and yahoo, right? :)

True, but signing up for a new account takes time -- all these email account providers ask plenty of questions. He may go through it a couple of times, but unless he is a script kiddie, he'll probably get tired of it soon enough.

Regards,

Erik </blockquote>

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