WikiIndex:Confirm account requests: Difference between revisions

Historically, when [[WikiIndex]] was created, the [[Founder|founding fathers]] had a very strong desire to have a fully 'open' [[wiki]]; meaning that not only could registered WikiIndex [[user|folks]] edit existing articles and create new ones, so could unregistered users, commonly known as [[IP editor]]s.  We call this an [[:Category:OpenEdit|open edit]] wiki.

IP editors are generally quite 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 [[vandal]]ise new or existing articles.  For many years after its inception, WikiIndex was able to manage with the occasional spam or vandalism edits, but recently, [[spambot]]s have become more sophisicated; and like a vast many other 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 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 [[sysop]]s of WikiIndex.  The management were eventually persuaded to take action, and as a result, the [[mw:Extension:ConfirmAccount|Confirm Account extension]] (amongst other tools) was enabled in our configuration.  This basically disables automatic account creation by new users, and requires manual approval by WikiIndex [[bureaucrat]]s (we have also enabled [[sysop]]s to also approve these new accont requests).  This system also requires that new user requests also submit a valid e-mail address, and this is subsequently confirmed as valid, before the account creation process is allowed to procede.