Hi all, it is perhaps unfortunate that my first post to the list is a bit of a rant, but I'm very concerned about the abuse of the file upload feature and so far I haven't seen any responses to the discussion on meta from people with the power to do something about it.
It seems to me from following the upload queue that it is being deliberately abused to store distinctly non-encyclopedia and copyright-infringing material on a disconcertingly large scale.
I would assume that this would be of direct financial concern to Bomis, both for the potential of large bandwidth costs and the potential for being sued, and to the rest of the project because of the risk of being shut down by a lawsuit.
Are we just going to attempt to keep this under control by the vigilance of a few dedicated Wikipedians, or might, in this case, some technical measures to discourage abuse be appropriate?
For instance, it might be feasible to restrict uploads to registered users, limiting the size and number of files that a user can upload in a day, perhaps even restricting the types of files that can be uploaded by checking with the "file" file type checking utility - that would at least prevent the uploading of executables).
I would be prepared to help implement some of the above. I'm a decent programmer, though I don't have any experience with PHP so it'd take me some time to get up to speed.
Obviously, I think technical measures to slow things is justified in this case, otherwise I suspect too much time will be wasted weeding out rather noxious material.