On 02/15/2010 07:55 PM, Domas Mituzas wrote: >> Yes, a simple restriction like this tends to create smarter villains >> rather than less villainy. Filtering on an obvious, easy-to-change >> characteristic also destroys a useful source of information on who the >> bad people are, making future abuse prevention efforts harder. >> > > Thanks for insights. But no. > > We don't use UA as first step of analysis, it was helpful tertiary tool, that > put these people into "ignorant or malicious" category. > If they'd have spoofed their UAs, we'd block the IPs and inform upstreams, as > fully malicious behavior. > If they had nice UA, we might have attempted to contact them or have isolated > their workload until the issue is fixed ;-) >
I am saying that going forward you have eliminated WMF's ability to use a tertiary tool that you agree was helpful. Having spent a lot of time dealing with abuse early in the Web's history, I wouldn't have done it that way. But it's not really my problem and you don't appear to be looking for input, so godspeed. William _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
