[Foundation-l] spamming of the english wikipedia users detected

[Robert Horning]

Dan Rosenthal wrote:
> This is a situation where the talk pages are not sufficient. When  
> it's the future of the project in question, I feel that this is a  
> justified undertaking.
>
> -Dan
> On Jul 3, 2007, at 11:42 AM, Sebastian Moleski wrote:
>
>   
>> On 7/3/07, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester at gmail.com> wrote:
>>     
>>> I disagree.
>>>
>>> The email-user function is opt-in, explicitly and clearly so. The
>>> subject of the emails is clearly related to both the Wikimedia
>>> foundation, and the project they are being emailed on. The fact that
>>> it is on a larger scale does not have anything to do with the fact
>>> that it is a related, important message, that is clearly about the
>>> project.
>>>       
>> The feature is indeed opt-in. Its there so one can contact an  
>> individual
>> user for situations where the talk page isn't sufficient. It is not  
>> intended
>> for mass messaging of any sort. Please consider the implications if  
>> this
>> weren't the case.
>>
>> Sebastian
>>     

There have been many times that I have needed private, personal 
communication with specific Wikimedia users.  For various and very 
legitimate reasons.  The e-mail function is explicitly to give this sort 
of communication where (particularly with my talk page on en.wikibooks) 
the user talk page is a very public forum for communication.  Spam in 
this situation is very much against this principle, and significantly 
reduces the value of this tool when it is needed the most.

Mass mailings in particular, even if very much project related, should 
be strongly discouraged at best and perhaps even banned explicitly by 
policy.  At the moment MediaWiki doesn't even offer the ability to 
perform mass mailings except if you open a bunch of e-mail links and 
simply copy and paste to each separate user.  Thank goodness for that 
"speedbump" to keep it from being abused even more than it has been in 
the past.

-- Robert Horning