[Wikimedia-l] Throttling (was: Re: Please can someone put 50p in the meter)

[Andrew Gray]

On 15 October 2012 09:30, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> WereSpielChequers, 15/10/2012 09:56:
>
>> 60 edits a minute sounds high, and probably faster than most of these
>> sessions run at, but not if it is as I suspect, calculated every few
>> seconds.
>
> It's not, as far as I can see. This is how it works:
> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgRateLimits> (someone please expand
> it otherwise).
> And these are all the existing limits:
> <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=operations/mediawiki-config.git;a=blob;f=wmf-config/InitialiseSettings.php;h=f814f3b46e996d6cb33d64c43965e807dfaec810;hb=HEAD#l6437>
> Does Andrew's experience not fit with this?

These limits confuse me a bit, I have to admit. The key one seems to be:

'edit' => array(
'ip'     => array( 8, 60 ),
'newbie' => array( 8, 60 ),

but per the manual, "ip" only applies to "each anon and recent
account", and "newbie" applies to "each recent account" - surely
"each" means the rate-limiting should be applied to the accounts
individually, rather than being triggered by them all coming from the
same location?

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Edit_throttling suggests it can
also be configured as something on the enwiki edit filters, but I've
had a look at those and couldn't immediately see one that seems to do
this.

> Rate limits have never been a problem with some minimal preparation:
> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Mass_account_creation> (in 6-7 years of
> WMIT workshops, I've never heard of big problems with this).

I want to emphasise again that I've pretty much never had problems
with account creation rate limiting - everyone attending a workshop is
asked to create an account as part of a little bit of homework three
days earlier - it's only ever been edit throttling that's an issue.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk