Tim Starling wrote:
The worst offenders we've discovered in recent times are the edit counters -- web based scripts that send requests to the servers often lasting minutes, with unrestricted parallelism. We were very tempted to block them all. We would have blocked them for much less if we weren't afraid having an angry mob of hundreds of Wikipedians obsessed with edit counts, descending on our door.
Amazing: You were very tempted to block them because they were causing too much traffic, but it still didn't occur to you to simply add the count to the Special:Contributions page, thereby peacefully rendering them obsolete?
Timwi