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