On Wed, 28 Nov 2007 04:47:12 -0500, zeroin23 wrote:

> you know right, by login, my opportunity cost have just increased thus
> resulting in me contributing less right? And if anyone were to spam
> here, we could always revert back right to pre-spam? is it really
> justified? if a spammer wants to, he can always automate and create
> dummy accounts to spam.

Most of the spam in Wikis is done using bots that don't login - and 
there's a captcha component to creating an account, making it difficult 
(if not impossible) to automate.

That's low-hanging fruit, and easy to deal with.

Counter that with the efforts of a volunteer team (remember that none of 
us get paid to do this), going and reverting massive quantities of 
automated spam posted to the wiki is something that nobody really has 
time for.

Creating a login is easy if you're a human.  Saving the user ID and 
password is easy if you use your browser to save that info.  It's not a 
hardship, and the payoff is significant compared to the administrative 
overhead of monitoring every change to see if it's spam.

Of course if you don't want to contribute, then don't - we'll miss the 
contribution, but the login requirement is not going to go away - it was 
a design specification for this implementation intended specifically to 
deal with the pervasive spamming problem so common on totally open Wikis.

Unless, of course, you're willing to pay me $80K a year to revert spammed 
posts so you can post anonymously, I'd be happy to give up my day job 
(well, no, not really - I enjoy my job too much to give it up).

:-)

Jim

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