Anthere wrote: This was an emergency measure to prevent a series of page move vandalisms by a vandalbot. It was moving pages with huge histories, which may have been a cause of the site significantly slowing down last night. It was too slow at one point for sysops to be able to fix the problem as they couldn't move the pages back without experiencing timeouts. I hope you understand that emergency measures like this need to be taken quickly, and there will not always be time for discussion on this. It was not intended to be permanent, and has now been changed to allow all but the most recently registered users to move pages. Angela.

Perhaps temporary measures should be accompanied by temporary warnings - a message, built into the software if necessary, that gives a reassurance that this is an emergency measure. Certainly something that needs considering whenever such a feature is implemented. [Not that I know what message *did* get displayed, but clearly it wasn't adequately informative, else this conversation wouldn't be happening.] Out of interest, is this being done by time, or by edits - can a user simply not access it for the first half hour / half day / whatever, or do they need to earn "experience"? Mind you, now I think about it I'm not sure there's much to choose between the two - neither the ability of a bot to get round it, nor the slight feeling of inequality created really varies. I'm guessing it's time-based, though, cos I can imagine how that might easily be codable. -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP]