Hi,

At least twice I found AbuseFilters that prevented people from testing extensions that I develop or posting feedback about them on MediaWiki.org and the beta testing sites (such as http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page ).

By their nature, the extensions I am working on have a lot to do with different (human) languages, and these AbuseFilters relied on the assumption that on these sites everything is supposed to be in English, and whatever is not English is probably spam.

One of them filtered out the whole Russian alphabet, so the extension couldn't be tested by Russian-speaking users. Another one didn't allow submitting Flow posts that don't have a sufficient amount of English words from users who have less than 6 edits, so users who have a lot of edits in their home wikis, but no edits in mediawiki.org, and who want to post in languages other than English are blocked. Luckily, one of those people pinged me directly, but I don't know how much useful feedback was filtered out and lost.

I acknowledge that spam is a problem and that there may be a better solution for multilingual testing and feedback than doing it all on one site English site, but till there are solutions for this, please consider non-English languages when defining AbuseFilters on our tech sites.

Thanks for understanding :)

-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬