On 12/11/07, Neil Harris usenet@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
I have a feeling this might have been done to make non-logged-in pages cacheable in an attempt to improve performance, rather than out of any privacy concerns.
I don't understand how this would affect cacheability at all? It just affects what's displayed in the page history.
It's true that the principles like "use real names" have fallen by the wayside over the past few years. It would be interesting to see them revived in a fashion like this. It's not very difficult to get the IP address of a typical user, anyway . . . you just need to get them to follow one link (say, by planting a dubious link on an article they're watching that they have to follow to see if it's legit) to get a shortlist.
I doubt anyone's going to remember anything from 2003, unless Magnus does. Maybe it's best to hunt through archives to see if this was discussed. (Although if it was just Magnus making the change in his new software, maybe nobody did discuss it.)