Ricordisamoa wrote:
Il 09/11/2014 18:33, MZMcBride ha scritto:
Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
But there is also a great heap of anecdotal data that shows that having to provide an email account increases the barrier of entry to users signing up. So, there's a tradeoff.
Eh, I think the anecdotal data (such as Facebook's and Google's hundreds of millions account registrations) suggests that e-mail confirmation is not a huge barrier to entry for legitimate users.
I think both Facebook and Google have enough staff resources to deal with spam, and they could even let bots create fake accounts as long as they don't harass other users, just to let the accounts counter increase. We can't afford that.
I'm not sure what you mean by can't afford that. What specific behaviors are we trying to prevent? Account registration alone isn't really a problem on MediaWiki wikis, just as it isn't a problem on Facebook or Google. The system scales. But if the accounts are registering and then spamming (creating new pages, making bad edits to existing pages, etc.), that's a real problem that we should try to solve as efficiently and cleanly as possible. Volunteer time is definitely precious.
I think calling this issue a sacred cow is a bit overblown, but requiring an e-mail address would be a violation of our shared values. We strive to be as open and independent as possible and requiring an e-mail address is antithetical to that. If anything, we could provide e-mail address aliases (e.g., mzmcbride@en.wikipedia.org) for our users as a side benefit.
What about case-sensitivity of user names vs email addresses then?
This is tangential, but... we should fix usernames to be case-insensitive. And we should support login via e-mail address. And we should (properly) support a display name field, in my opinion. Hopefully, in time. :-)
In addition to better heuristics, as Robert suggested, we could also focus on tasks such as https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T20110, maybe. Using AbuseFilter to trigger CAPTCHAs seems like it would either be a really great or a really terrible idea. At least making this functionality available as an option to potentially try seems worthwhile.
MZMcBride