[WikiEN-l] Saving bandwidth: random pages

[Tony Wilson]

This has probably been suggested before, but just in case: the "random
page" function (as we all know) produces gadzillions of entries on
two-horse towns in the USA. Surfing for a random page, as a result, is
slow and frustrating, practically unusable if you are on dialup. But it
must involve a bit of server load too, dishing up all those pages which
most people are not interested in and causing them to hit another
random page, and another, and another. (Or give up and go elsewhere, of
course.)

I guess that it would be a non-trivial task to fix the page-selection
process to leave the little towns out, but (as a temporary hack),
perhaps the random page function could ignore all entries that have a
comma in the title. That would come somewhere within cooee of the
desired result and might be easy to implement. Obviously, it would need
to be a user-selectable option rather than a compulsory-for-all-users
one.


Tony Wilson
(Tannin)
list at redhill.net.au