On 01/10/06, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:

Whether we are talking about companies or fictitious islands, I do not believe "block, nuke, and salt the Earth more aggressively!" is the answer. That's partially because blocking is a very, very flawed tool (it's very easy to circumvent), and "hard" security measures in a fundamentally open environment tend to only inspire people to find clever ways to circumvent them and to make themselves even more of a PITA than they already are. Of course we should block individuals where appropriate, but I'm not convinced that increasing the amount of blocking and nuking is going to help us much right now.

Yes.

Danny, Brad: please understand that making up a new special rule every time there's a new problem is a *really bad* thing to do.

Ad hoc rules are where instruction creep comes from. This leads to a confusing and incoherent thicket of rules that no-one can make sense of. Special cases make bad law.

I had a press interview with the Daily Telegraph on Friday. A large chunk of that was him telling me how confusing our bureaucracy already was to newcomers. Please don't make it even worse.

(Main article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:PRO )

- d.