On 5/24/05, Colm Buckley <colm at tuatha.org> wrote:
> On 24 May 2005, at 00:22, Rory Browne wrote:
>> > I respect the fact that you're the server admin Colm, but could you
> > loosen up a bit?
>> No, I don't think so; I've run Wikis and similar user-contributed
> sites before, and the one lesson I've learned is that you can't
> underestimate the determination of spambots. Our experiences with
> the ILUG blogs site are pretty salutary also.
There's a big difference between 'Enter your email address to create
an account' versus 'Mail this administrator to create an account' in
terms of likelihood of having people contribute content. With the
first approach, it's all (relatively) immediate and someone who wants
to post something can still go ahead and do that in the same session.
With the second, he's got to wait for the administrator to process the
mail and then come back and remember what he was going to write about.
Ironically, the second approach also creates more work for the
administrators.
If we start the wiki with the security too lax, you can always tighten
it later, perhaps by requiring administrator approval to create
accounts. If we start with the security too tight, we'll never know
how much content we're missing out on.
I've run public wiki's before and would definately err on the side of openness.
/dh
ps At the risk of another flaming, it's also not consistent with the
mailing list's policy of accepting mail from unregistered users.
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