The Cunctator wrote:
On 8/7/02 1:32 PM, "Ray Saintonge" saintonge@telus.net wrote:
In the past he challenged the technical tree by attempting to shake the bugs out of it. Now, he may have unwittingly done the same to its human resources. If he had identified himself in the first place I doubt that we would ever have had this fuss. Instead some sysops saw this as the irresponsible actions of a newbie, and went straight into panic mode. There is nothing wrong with looking at a newbie's contributions more carefully than you would at those of a known contributor, but the yardstick that you apply in evaluating those contributions must remain the same one.
What panic mode? I'm as suspicious as the next, but the only thing that happened was that the automatic text-adder had its IP blocked, since that was the only easy way to stop it.
I didn't see much recrimination, just action.
Just to clarify things: I was perfectly happy with the temporary ban. Both the human and software systems worked fine, and I got a message saying why my bot was IP-banned. I'm not upset at all: things like this tend to happen when you unleash automated tools, which is why they should be tested before they are run and monitored as they run: both of which I did - but no-one was to know that.
My posting script does not do cookies, so I can't easily do it under a login. IP banning is a good way to stop such a bot, and did so effectively.
Lessons learned:
* The only thing missing, from my perspective of being on the end of an IP ban, was a way to contact the administrator: perhaps banned IP's should have a single 'talkback' page that they could be allowed to write to, or a way of notifying the list via an E-mail gateway. * Perhaps I should notify the list before running this sort of tool, to avoid confusion. * A general "You have mail: click here to read" flag for a user would be useful: maybe based on an update to their user talk page more recent than their most recent visit to that page.
Neil