[Wikipedia-l] Easton's Bible Dictionary

[Neil Harris]

The Cunctator wrote:

>On 8/7/02 1:32 PM, "Ray Saintonge" <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
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>>In the past he challenged the technical tree by attempting to shake the
>>bugs out of it.  Now, he may have unwittingly done the same to its human
>>resources.  If he had identified himself in the first place I doubt that
>>we would ever have had this fuss.  Instead some sysops saw this as the
>>irresponsible actions of a newbie, and went straight into panic mode.
>>There is nothing wrong with looking at a newbie's contributions more
>>carefully than you would at those of a known contributor, but the
>>yardstick that you apply in evaluating those contributions must remain
>>the same one.
>>    
>>
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>What panic mode? I'm as suspicious as the next, but the only thing that
>happened was that the automatic text-adder had its IP blocked, since that
>was the only easy way to stop it.
>
>I didn't see much recrimination, just action.
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Just to clarify things: I was perfectly happy with the temporary ban. 
Both the human and software systems worked fine, and I got a message 
saying why my bot was IP-banned. I'm not upset at all: things like this 
tend to happen when you unleash automated tools, which is why they 
should be tested before they are run and monitored as they run: both of 
which I did - but no-one was to know that.

My posting script does not do cookies, so I can't easily do it under a 
login.  IP banning is a good way to stop such a bot, and did so effectively.

Lessons learned:

* The only thing missing, from my perspective of being on the end of an 
IP ban, was a way to contact the administrator: perhaps banned IP's 
should have a single 'talkback' page that they could be allowed to write 
to, or a way of notifying the list via an E-mail gateway.
* Perhaps I should notify the list before running this sort of tool, to 
avoid confusion.
* A general "You have mail: click here to read" flag for a user would be 
useful: maybe based on an update to their user talk page more recent 
than their most recent visit to that page.

Neil

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