Marc A. Pelletier wrote: >But there is also a great heap of anecdotal data that shows that having >to provide an email account increases the barrier of entry to users >signing up. So, there's a tradeoff.
Eh, I think the anecdotal data (such as Facebook's and Google's hundreds of millions account registrations) suggests that e-mail confirmation is not a huge barrier to entry for legitimate users. >Spambots (of which there are multitude, and that hammer any mediawiki >site constantly) have gotten pretty good at bypassing captchas but have >yet to respond properly to email loops (and that's a more complicated >obstacle than first appears; throwaway accounts are cheap but any >process that requires a delay - however small - means that spambot must >now maintain state and interact rather than fire-and-forget). Hmmm, I imagine many spambots have already made this investment if they're dealing with popular systems that require e-mail address confirmation. Wikimedia is different. You shouldn't even need an account to edit, much less an e-mail address. But this is a philosophical and principle-based (principled, if you will!) decision, not really a user experience or technical decision, in my opinion. I think calling this issue a sacred cow is a bit overblown, but requiring an e-mail address would be a violation of our shared values. We strive to be as open and independent as possible and requiring an e-mail address is antithetical to that. If anything, we could provide e-mail address aliases (e.g., mzmcbr...@en.wikipedia.org) for our users as a side benefit. MZMcBride _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
