Somebody who is not willing to put a minimal effort into a registration form will never be an editor worth bothering, not for Fantasy, not for anything else.
I just manually checked 40 (!) new account requests. And I approved ONE - ONE SINGLE ONE. And that one did not fill out the "additional notes" field, so even that one might be a spammer. So really why should I waste precious time if almost all these requests could have been stopped dead in their tracks and would not have made it onto my control board? There is really no reason.
And as I said before: Somebody who is put off by a ridiculous "hurdle" the height of an anti-ant fence can never be an editor, no matter how desperate the need as they will never be able to withstand the ENORMOUS psychological pressure of actually having to follow Lexicanum rules. Just imagine the first time somebody points out to them they will have to *gasp* source an article or - Emperor forbids - point out a spelling mistake! They will immediately open their window and jump, hurling abuse at the world for how injust and ridiculously high the hurdles for editing are! We cannot possibly take that responsability
So today 166 open account requests waited for me (English 40K Lex only). Of these I blocked 155 as spambots (~93,4%). Of the blocked spambots 70 accounts had their e-mail addresses confirmed (~45%).
Of the 11 approved accounts I could verify NONE as genuine users with any degree of certainty due to lack of info. Only 5 of the 11 even had their e-mail addresses confirmed; a mere 3 had written ANYTHING into their info box of which 2 were number sequences (phone numbers?). ONE was maybe the name of a homebrew chapter. Or maybe not.
So how am I supposed to work with this?
Hey Inquisitor S.
I had a similar experience going through about 150 applications about 2 weeks back on the 40K english wiki - with about a dozen being legitimate. There is a LOT of Russian spam out there these days.
I consider the shortened application update from several months back to be a flawed implementation based on the results we are seeing.
I do like the shortened application and we had to do some updates no matter what, to move to the current version of mediawiki.
BUT...
I agree that we need to change the "Info Box" to mandatory, so they have put in something, anything in there we can use to gauge what type of applicant they are. Our programmer is out on holiday, but I will ask him to go in and change the field from optional to mandatory on all the wikis when he is back after the new year.
-Larry
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Hi Bigred,
thanks for the feedback.
yeah, the really STRANGE thing though is that the last couple of days spambot registering is REALLY slow as compared to pre-Xmas-time. Did they cut off Russia from the internet? Is St Petersburg collectively too drunk? We'll never know
I would also ask if e-mail-confirmation should not be mandatory. After all without a confirmed e-mail how could a legit user have an account?
If you're going to make the other information section obligatory, you should atleast change what its request of the user. Currently it has:
"The following information is kept private and will only be used for this request. You may want to list contacts such a phone number to aid in identify confirmation"
Which basicly means "gives us your phone number" which will likely scare people off. Maybe change it to something like "Provides us with a basic background on yourself, so we can distinguish between a genuine user and a spam bot."