WikiIndex:Confirm account requests

NOT YET FINISHED - WILL RETURN SHORTLY TO COMPLETE Sean, aka Hoof Hearted • Admin / 'Crat • talk2HH 18:26, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

WikiIndex:Confirm account requests —

Historically, when WikiIndex was created in 2006, the founding fathers had a very strong desire to have a fully 'open' wiki; meaning that not only could registered WikiIndex folks edit existing articles and create new ones, so could unregistered users, commonly known as IP editors. We at  call this method an 'open edit' wiki. Anybody could register for a user account here on WikiIndex without any intervention or approval, and did not even need a valid e-mail address.

IP editors are generally somewhat restricted in what they can submit, usually needing to satisfy various anti-spam measures, including 'CAPTCHA'. However, registered users do not have to satisfy such restrictions, are much freer in the content they can submit, and therefore also much easier to post spammy links or vandalise new or existing articles. For many years after its inception, WikiIndex was able to manage with the occasional spam attack or vandalism edits, but recently, spambots have become more sophisicated; and like a vast many other open wiki, WikiIndex became a very frequent and determined target of such disruptive behaviour. We were plagued by hundreds, maybe thousands of new account registrations by spambots, and many of them went on major offensives of disrupting and damaging WikiIndex by way of flooding us with huge numbers of spam and / or vandalism edits. We persevered for a while with the status quo, but it became a huge drain on the resources and time of WikiIndex sysops. The management of WikiIndex were eventually persuaded to take action, and as a result, the Confirm Account extension (amongst other tools) was enabled in our MediaWiki configuration. This basically disabled automatic account creation by new users, and requires manual approval by WikiIndex bureaucrats (we have also enabled sysops to also approve these new accont requests). This system also requires that new user requests also submit a brief biography and a valid e-mail address, the latter needs to be subsequently confirmed a valid e-mail, before the account creation process is allowed to procede.