Timwi wrote:
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?
You're confusing development with system administration. Development takes time. Sometimes a situation develops, and a solution is required at the system administration level, while development is in progress. At the time, the user_editcount field had been recently introduced, but it clearly wasn't sufficient to provide the information users were looking for, as Simetrical notes. Other options for development were apparent, but the expected development time was too long.
It's always going to be a tough decision, when it comes to limiting, suspending or denying services. But it would be irresponsible to just let site-wide performance descend to glacial speeds while development is in progress.
-- Tim Starling