On 10/11/06, Simetrical Simetrical+wikitech@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/11/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Following up from a discussion on unblock-en-l...
How much effort would it be to add an enhancement to treat blocked user redlink clicks like we currently treat anon user redlink clicks when anon article creation is disabled?
We're trying to minimize the number of people who are fundamentally just readers, who click on a redlink and see a block message (mostly AOL users, but it happens to others). If they click on the "edit" bar and get it, that's fine, but if the default redlink behavior didn't show the block message then that would be great.
Thanks.
I don't think it would be appropriate to just say "you can't create this article because you aren't logged in", when there are more reasons as well. That would imply to the user that if they *did* log in, they'd be allowed to create the article, which isn't the case. They need to be informed that they've been blocked, preferably as well as any other reasons they can't do stuff.
The problem here is that a lot of people "are blocked" who really aren't specifically... anyone at AOL who hasn't already created a WP account and consistently logging in, for example, is blocked from editing a significant fraction of the time, due to rolling AOL vandal IP blocks.
Telling them that they're blocked if they click "Edit" is fine; that's a clear positive action intending to edit something.
A lot of requests that come in to unblock-en-l are AOL people who had clicked on a redlink and thought they'd been blocked from reading.
It's not really denying info to a really blocked person; most of the time an "editor" goes to edit something, they don't start by clicking on a redlink to create a new article. A small fraction of the time, yes, but not most of the time.
I think that accepting that a small fraction of the time, some blocked users will hit a redlink and stumble a bit more before they find out that they're blocked, while making nearly all the AOL complaints simply go away, would be a strong net positive.