Agree lets see something first and talk politics elsewhere. FWIW I put the no new user pages down to an intelligent change to robots.txt which seems to have recently been reversed (what links here isn't /w/ anymore... why, that helped). I might take it up on your user page when I've time
================== Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 1/24/07, Andrew Cates andrew@catesfamily.org.uk wrote:
I can tell you for free (since I went through thousands of them for the WP CD) that an article having a quality flag doesn't reduce the risk of vandalism or spam. It is more attractive than anything else.
Yes, as I said in my initial post.. I do not believe that simply overloading the not-vandalized flag by itself is sufficient, mostly because people don't bother looking at the externals.. and often people feel uncomfortable removing them. The same mechanism, however, could be easily applied to collect data on link reviews as they are performed... Even without that it would still give us a point of attack (i.e. when you validate a page, be sure to check new links), today we don't have such a hook.
[snip]
Removing spam from WP is ever harder work and no one has predicted that "nofollow" will help with making the en better quality or help keep spam away. Phrases involving babies and bathwater come to mind.
We saw an almost complete end of User: pages created by otherwise inactive users which were filled with nothing but external links after turning on nofollow for user: namespace a few months back.
I'd comment more, but this is going offtopic into the land of local wiki politics. Perhaps this discussion should be continued once someone has actually coded something?