[WikiEN-l] Policy proposal: require e-mail confirmation
Nicholas Knight
nknight at runawaynet.com
Mon Nov 8 22:32:40 UTC 2004
uninvited at nerstrand.net wrote:
> Requiring a confirmed e-mail address would have little effect on
> legitimate contributors and would help considerably in dealing with
> problem users:
It's remarkable how every time someone proposes to violate privacy, they
declare that it will have "little effect" on legitimate people.
> a. It would complicate the construction of vandalbots that register a
> username and then conduct high-speed vandalism
Congratulations, you've slowed down the creation of vandal bots by a
one-time five minutes, and the creation of each vandal bot account by a
few seconds.
Oh, and you've also slowed down the registration process for real people
by a few minutes, and scared off people that don't want to be handing
out their email address.
> b. It would provide a better basis for following up on abusive users in
> egregious cases where an ISP must be contacted
No vandal is going to give their ISP-provided email address, and I fail
to understand how it would provide any better basis than their IP
address even if they did.
> c. It would allow likely socks to be more rapidly identified
How? Anyone with a modicum of intelligence creating sockpuppets isn't
going to provide the same or even similar email addresses.
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