Triptych wrote:eagle wrote:Certainly students and basement dwellers generally lack the resources to travel to conferences, so scholarships are a necessary part of attracting a geographically-diverse set of participants.
Nonsense. There is a far better way, called "travel equalization," it's what Alcoholics Anonymous uses for the World Service Conference. Expenses are paid, not by the AA General Service Office, but by Area organizations, and that is part of the design of AA, what made it so spectacularly successful in its field. All Areas, no matter where located, pay the same conference registration, and then the GSO distributes this money to pay travel expenses.
Basement dwellers? We want to encourage basement dwellers to maintain
and control the encyclopedia projects? Nothing against dwelling in a basement, but it's not exactly a mark of maturity and sanity.
The central achievement cited by Beeblebrox in his successful run for Arbcom was that he has blocked 2600 editors. Why wouldn't an organizer like you get him that good travel, accommodations, and incidentals pay-off for his Washington DC visit?
A mere 2600 editors? And merely "blocked"?
I just checked the global account log for Billinghurst. Almost all global account actions are locks, which is far, far more a "fuck you" than a mere block. 5000 global account actions took me back to 14:18, 23 September 2013. 5000 more to 11:40, 14 July 2013. 5000 more to 20:55, 7 November 2012. Loading 5000 more took me back to his first global lock, where he locked his own account. Twice. 13:10, 28 February 2012.
So he has locked approaching 20,000 accounts. In a little more than two years. This is what I was studying in the deleted pages on meta. Almost all these locks could be justified, I'm sure. Most of the locked accounts, at least of late, show no edits. That could be coming in two ways: checkuser, either locally where he has the privilege, or on loginwiki, likewise, so he sees a pattern of registrations indicating spambot, (or manual registrations that are called "spambot.), or, alternatively, one or more of linked registrations have triggered an edit filter, and the edit was rejected by the filter.
Is this response to spambots deterring the spammers? Apparently not. Here is the problem I see. That vast flood of locks covers up the few abusive locks. Nobody watches. There is a far better way, beginning with global account blocking. That tool has been stated as desirable for years, but it's obviously not getting priority. Why not? Global locking *sucks*. In the 5000 lock study that I'd compiled, there were several uncovered locks in error, of ordinary editors. It took as much as months for this to be discovered and corrected. The user doesn't get any message as to why and by whom they were locked. The symptom they see is that login fails. They cannot edit their watchlist. They cannot send email or edit their user page. Account locking is a blunt instrument.
So part of my goal was, through RfC, to establish community consensus on encouraging developers to create global account blocking, which local admins could then bypass. And global account blocking could exempt meta, allowing appeal, the same as is now the case with global IP blocking.
Oh, and I'm sure Kohser enjoys you lumping him in there with Trump and Bloomberg.
Hey, Greg, how about tossing me some of that vast fortune? Or maybe you could get me a reduced rate with Comcast, your pricing becomes horrible after the attractive initial offer expires?
--70-year-old man, Abd, lives with his daughter. Not in a basement, but an apartment crammed with stuff. Before she moved in, but especially since she moved in. She's not supporting me yet, she's twelve.